Content Category: Choice Literacy
Results
Sincerely Positive
If you can’t find anything positive to say, it’s likely you have not fully analyzed what you’ve observed. This is not because there is always necessarily something good going on,...
Quick Take: Beware of Pet Peeves
Ruth Ayres cautions us to not let our pet peeves get in the way when working with student writers.
Three Meaningful Ways to Incorporate Drawing into English Class
When students enter my high school English classroom and see the bins of colored pencils and markers out, many of them are excited, but there are always a few who...
Lead with Art, and Literacy Will Naturally Follow
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. —Pablo Picasso There is one book that always makes it onto my personal...
August 13: What Do Our Youngest Writers Need?
It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see. —Henry David Thoreau What If What if students entered the classroom on the first day and the rug...
Reasons to Launch Writer’s Notebooks with Primary Writers
We had been writing all year. Making book after book. It started to feel mundane. I wondered if my students were getting the message that writers write only books. I...
Supports for Our Youngest Writers
“You have to know 48 letters to begin to write,” the primary educator proclaimed to the large group gathered to take a closer look at emergent and early writers. As...
August 6: How Do Readers and Writers Use Images?
How are you noticing the emerging stories of your life? —Carl Jung My Summer Vacation August makes me nostalgic, mostly because when I was a little kid, it was the...
Minilessons About Sound and Image
Digital content has opened the floodgates and immersed our students (and us) in images and sounds more than ever before. TikTok, Instagram, video games, memes, and YouTube, to name a...
Combining Personal Narratives and Comics
Two units that I’ve taught in my classroom for years are always favorites: personal narratives and comics. Personal narratives I’ve loved for many reasons. One, whether I'm teaching fifth grade...
Using Art to Bridge Storytelling
Aminah Robinson was an Ohio-born artist (1940-2015) whose paintings, drawings, and poetry honor African American culture by exploring history and ancestral legend. Some of the themes explored in her work...
July 30, 2021: What Routines Might You Reconsider for Next School Year?
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. —John Maynard Keynes Small Gifts Are Special When I turned 12, I received one...
Teaching Students How to Email
Email. It can be the bane of our existence, right? Not too long ago I saw a meme on social media. It showed two email icons. At the top it...
Rethinking Late-Work Policies
As the first quarter of the year, which had been completely virtual, came to an end, I received the following email from one of my students, an 11th grader named...
July 23, 2021: How Does Technology Enhance Workshop Routines?
Assume the best intent in others around you. You will often be right, and even when you're not, people can rise to your view of them. Not always, but enough...
Google Classroom Boot Camp
One of my pet peeves about Google Classroom is that as a teacher, my view of Classroom isn’t the same as my students'. So until I had some enterprising and...
Four Tools for Hosting Online Book Clubs
Before the pandemic, there were some common technology integrations in literacy classrooms. Learning management systems, like Google Classroom and Seesaw, were becoming ubiquitous for teachers to post assignments and collect...
Finding Reliable Digital Reading Resources
One of the things I love about education is that it is always evolving. When tablets first became the rage years ago, I looked for ways to incorporate them into...
June 25, 2021: How Do You Reach Readers?
If I'm gonna tell a real story, I'm gonna start with my name. —Kendrick Lamar How Did You Get Your Name? When I was born, my parents told the nurse...
June 18, 2021: Mentor Texts
Pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things. —Ian Bogost The Art of Noticing I am constantly trying to live an unhurried life. It's been a quest for most of...
Playing with Words
Many years ago I attended an exceptional keynote address about supporting vocabulary development through content areas. I typed quickly, capturing the words of wisdom, and brought the ideas back to...
