Content Category: Choice Literacy
Results
Tapping into What Students Know
A surefire way for me to get snapped at is to tell my daughter to put on her turn signal while she's driving just as she’s about to do it...
Assessing Learning: Quick Conferences
Leslie Lloyd completes quick assessment conferences with her third graders after a lesson on "literal" and "nonliteral" language, based on standards from the Common Core. You can view the original...
The Big Fresh May 27, 2017 Tyranny of the Score
Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try. Atul Gawande In...
Creating an On-Demand Writing Checklist
At the start and end of each writing unit, we use on-demand writing to assess what our students already know about a particular genre. This practice is one that we’ve...
Assessing Instruction in the Midst
I began to teach my nephew the game of Hearts a few nights ago. He understood the basic principles quickly. I could tell because he knew to pass me the...
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...
The Big Fresh May 20, 2017 Lollipop Moments
Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most. Fyodor Dostoyevsky A shy girl arrives at the college she has committed to attend, and is overwhelmed....
Building Community and Family Connections
We’re sure you’d agree that setting up positive relationships with your students and their families at the beginning of the year is a crucial part of having a successful year....
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...
Stretching Writing in First Grade
Katrina Edwards helps first grader Lila stretch her writing about going to a park on a rainy day.
Explaining a Workshop Model to Parents (Part 2)
A friend recently went with her mother to an important medical appointment. When she spoke to the physician, she found herself confused and unsure: “He was using words I didn’t...
The Big Fresh May 13, 2017 Illiterate?
Illiteracy is the inability of a person to learn. It is not all about the inability to read or write as the middle class regards it. Paul Bamikole In his...
Monday Headlines
A few years into our teaching career, we came across the idea of using time on Monday mornings to have our students tell stories from their weekend. The idea was...
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.
Literary Analysis: Counterclaims
We were in the thick of a writing unit of study, and my teacher heart did not want to admit that literary analysis essays are argumentative. My eighth graders were...
Explaining a Workshop Model to Parents
I frequently sit in on parent-teacher conferences, most often when a student is struggling in class or when a parent is particularly concerned about a child’s progress. In doing so,...
The Big Fresh May 6, 2017 Mentors Who Matter
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Mark Twain Recently I was reading an interview with...
Mentor Texts and Important Reminders
Sometimes when I am working with students, we delve into a mentor text and find so many elements to admire that it becomes overwhelming instead of inspiring. As with so...
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...
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.
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...
