At the end of the 2015-16 school year, I wrote a proposal to be considered for a Chromebook pilot in our junior high. In 2017-18, our school district would be a 1:1 school, but this school year (2016-17), the district was looking for teachers who …
Text Me What You’re Reading This Weekend
How are you encouraging students and their families to make time for weekend reading? Now that we are back to school, my #bookaday is not getting much action. With more to do, I have to be more deliberate about making time to read, and I …
#bookaday: My Summer’s Top 20 (Plus 100 More)
From living in a 1930s Kentucky mining town in Empty Spaces to being the last man on earth in Y:The Last Man, from being an orphan on the streets in Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London to being an orphan in a haunted house in The Night Gardener, from being the outcast robot among forest creatures in The Wild Robot to being the outsider on a roller derby team in Roller Girl, from the escapades of a trio of teen boys in Ms. Bixby’s Last Day to a trio of teen girls in Raymie Nightingale — only with books could I have spent time with such an interesting group of people (#bookaday).
Listening to Students
“Listening means creating an audience for children. And one of the best ways to pull children forward into literacy is to become an active, interested audience in their reading lives” (59, No More Reading for Junk).
10 Steps to a Short But Meaningful Welcome Letter
When it comes to composing the welcome back letter to parents and students, we also have to think about how we can blend the practical and ethical. Communication is so important when it comes to nurturing a community that values learning in and beyond the classroom, and with technology, there are a lot of ways to do that, which can be overwhelming, become time consuming, and ultimately distract readers from the important ideas you want to emphasize.
A Little Reading & Writing, and A Lot of Building Community
I have found that before people can accept and value diversity in others, they need to first see similarities. Teachers and students need to learn more than each others’ names; it vital that they learn about each other, who they are. It is important that teachers help students to forge new friendships, for each class to form an “Us,” rather than and “Us” and “Them.”
4 Steps Toward a More Inclusive Classroom
An inclusive curriculum promotes an understanding that within any group – racial, ethnic, religious, class, ability, gender, sexual orientation –there are variations, and that among groups, there are similarities. However, an inclusive curriculum is not just a checklist of texts, films, and articles about difference.
Building Community through Collaboration by Lesley Roessing
Originally published on January 24, 2016, Ethical ELA is re-posting “Building Community” by Lesley Roessing as a call to all teachers to make building community a priority in the first weeks of your school year and to nurture community every step of the way. _____________________________________________________________________________ …
Review of Nobody Nowhere The Extraordinary Autobiography of An Autistic by Donna Williams
As a teacher, I found myself stopping and wondering: Do I often only hear babbling where there is, in fact, poetry? How do my assumptions and expectations for student writing and communication block a student’s ability to communicate? Do my expectations work against my intentions?
Classroom Library Systems: Apps, Cards, Sheets, & None of the Above (Survey Results, Part 2)
In Taking Care of Your Classroom Library Books, I shared results from a summer survey of teachers on how they manage their classroom libraries and advice from my local library focusing on book care. In this follow-up post, I will share more results from the …