Choice Lit Topic: Teaching Writing
Everyone who writes for Choice Literacy loves teaching writing, because we all write ourselves. We know it is “hard fun,” as Donald Murray famously said—exasperating and exhilarating at the same time. The writing workshops you will read about here and see in our videos are busy, noisy, vibrant places. And most days, we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else than in the midst of ’em! Here is where you’ll find our latest discoveries, insights, and occasional boneheaded mistakes in teaching writing.
Results
Expert Students
“You have this way of buzzing around the room and sprinkling what each student needs right over them,” my administrator once told me in an evaluation conference. It was supposed...
Literary Analysis: Tone and Scholarly Writing
Nadia was a social being. I would teasingly reproach her by saying, “Wherever Nadia is, talking is happening,” and it was invariably true. So it was only natural that her...
Brainstorming Writing Topics with Drew
Katherine Sokolowski confers with Drew about writing at home, brainstorming possible topics. In the process she shows how much she knows about Drew's life outside of school.
First-Grade Minilesson: Reading Like Writers
Bitsy Parks teaches her first graders early in the year how to read like writers, highlighting examples from favorite mentor texts.
Using If I Stay to Model Literary Analysis
It was nearing the end of the school year, and I was asking my eighth-grade students to pour all of their energy into scholarly literary analysis essays. So it's no...
Building Relationships with Authors
The whole concept of mentorship is based on people and the learning relationships between them, so the only authentic way to approach the idea of mentorship with children is to...
Hosting Reading and Writing Events
“Is it true that we get a copy of the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book next year?” an incoming fourth grader askd on step-up day. He was referring...
Minilesson: Writing a Mentor Text
In this minilesson, Gigi McAllister uses her own writing as a model for adding character traits to a draft.
Get in the Pool: Teachers Who Write
I always wanted to be a writer. As a little girl, I kept notebooks and folders filled with loose-leaf pages of my latest novel. I wrote a lot of haunted-house...
Teachers Who Write
At a recent roundtable presentation, the facilitator asked us to think about our core beliefs when it comes to literacy, teaching, and learning. Although I agreed that everything I was...
The Riskiest Writing
Being a writer means taking risks. Nothing feels riskier than writing live in front of your students, yet no other writing model is more valuable. Let’s step back for a...
Literacy Routines for Applying See-Think-Wonder
What do you see? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder? Debbie, Paula, and Sylvia are doing a book study with Making Thinking Visible: How...
Teaching Students to Start at the Right Place
I read a lot of student writing. Somehow, no matter how many years students have heard about small moments, they fall into the trap of making stories longer by making...
Environmental Group Notes
Katherine Sokolowski meets briefly with a group of fifth-grade girls to go through the notes they are taking for their environmental studies project and talk through next steps.
Do I Really Have to Keep Conferring Notes?
When it comes to conferring, the million-dollar question is “Do I really need to keep conference notes?” This is a fair question, and one that is best answered by looking...
Reminder Notes
This sweet invitation—"you can come to my basketball game"—greets me after children have been dismissed for the day and I’m cleaning up my teaching area. It is common to find...
The Ins and Outs of Using a Jot Lot
We’ve often talked with colleagues about how reading feels much more challenging to teach than writing: It’s so hard to know what’s going on in their heads as they read....
Getting the Ball Rolling in a Realistic Fiction Unit
Sometimes I think of the beginning of a writing unit as the beginning of a snowman. You start with a patch of snow, and then you start rolling. You hope...
Free Range Learning with Nonfiction (Part 1)
I have always been a nonfiction lover. Even in the early 1970s before the children’s book industry embraced informational texts for children, I loved reading about my world. Fact lists...
Life in a Single Breath
the sky shivers in the pond, clouds pass through watery leaves— autumn darkens great silent owl sweeps over the field, moonlight splinters late september woodsmoke and leafpiles— the last of...
Conferring Questions
When I first jumped into writing workshop, I was nervous about what to say in a conference. I wanted to get it right, and I didn’t want to look ridiculous....
