Most days in my junior high and college writing classes we begin with a quick write. I call them “Compose for 7’s” because we write for seven minutes, and our intention is to use that time to compose something that we can get into, explore, …
Sticky Revisions
You carefully modeled complex sentences. You even organized this great activity where you cut large strips of text with subordinating conjunctions and independent clauses. You asked a student to color in 4-inch periods and commas during homeroom. Using their bodies, students created complex sentences with …
“Gifted” by Sue Weinstein
A few evenings ago, I posted the following message on my Facebook page: Educators: Stop filling “gifted” students’ heads with biases against “regular” students. The problem is yours, and you’re infecting children with it. Comments immediately popped up. One woman wrote that this had happened …
A Conversation on Liking and Appreciating Books (plus a Groovy Playlist)
School started on Wednesday. We started our time together talking about the differences and similarities between “liking” and “appreciating” books. We did not take notes on this discussion, but the more we talked about the denotation and connotation, the more we came to understand the …
Reading Response 4-ish Ways
For the past few years, choice reading has been the foundation of my reading pedagogy because choice values students as human beings with a range of interests, experiences, and tastes and because choice shares the responsibility of teaching with all the readers and books in …
Book Groups with Sarah Donovan #nErDcampMI
It was a lovely afternoon in Parma, Michigan. Clear skies guided our walk from Western High School’s gym where we’d just listened to Meg Medina, Pernille Ripp, Chad Everett, Sara Ahmed, and Donalyn Miller give their seven-minute Nerd Talks, each a call-to-action. We carried their …
Easing into Choice Individual and Book Group Reading: A Progressive Approach
I have just returned from the first Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult literature at UNLV (#yasummit2018, Steve Bickmore). In this unique professional development experience, authors, researchers, teachers, librarians, and school administrators came together for three days to discuss how we can make …
Choice in the ELA Classroom: Justifying Choice #yasummit2018
This is where I will share information from today’s session at the #yasummit2018. I will add more information after the session as I hope we will develop some resources together. Survey Justifying individual choices in reading: Penny Kittle’s for high school and Pernille Ripp’s middle school …
Junior High Students Offer Insight on Verse Novels: 50 books and Comparison Essays
Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover and Booked have been popular in my junior high classroom the past couple of years, which got me reading more verse novels and searching for others to recommended to students. This school year, I decided we would uncover just what is …
Time: Part, Full, Priceless, Costly
Around year ten in teaching, I decided to take my first early morning run of the summer on the last day of teaching. I am not sure why — maybe I did it unintentionally the first time and craved it subsequent years for its physical …