Resources. Featured Topic: Student Publishing The National Novel Writing Month's Young Writers Program makes writing fun for students because of, not despite, its audacious goal: kids must pen a novel in a month.
More › Teen Ink, called "The New Yorker for Teens," is the nation's largest publisher of teen work in print and online. Writing Project teachers and their students have been involved in Teen Ink for years. Students can submit fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book, movie and music reviews, and more. Katie Robbins, director of educational programming at Figment, an online community where young adults and teens come together to create, discover, and share their own writing and discuss their favorite works, discusses how Figment can be used in the classroom. NWP Bookstore Browse our collection of books written for teachers by teachers to stimulate your thinking about classroom practice, teacher research, and professional development for teachers of writing. Other Publications Encourage Writing. Words, Words, Words by Janet Allen - intro section. Find Similar or Opposite words at WordHippo.com. Inside Angela's 4th Grade Classroom: Replacing Overused Words: Just a Band-Aid.
A quick Internet check offers a plethora of activities and suggestions for making writing "sizzle," but I can't help but notice how this attempt at "correcting" writing has gone wrong.
Call it what you'd like: putting said to bed; million dollar words; sizzle words; worn out words; snazzy synonyms; graveyard words. The list goes on. But the reality is this- replacing "She was sad," with "She was depressed," doesn't push our students to new levels of writing proficiency. It is only a band-aid to a larger goal at hand. Where Descriptive Words Have Gone Wrong. Design - Teaching / Learning Method. The History of the Storyline Method » How the Storyline Method came to be Integrating curriculum The Topic Web and the Storyline Method Answers to questions about the Storyline Method Why the Storyline Method makes sense It’s the principle of the thing.
ELA Lesson Sequence for the Common Core: Saying More With Less. 3 Digital Storytelling Project Ideas. Digital storytelling projects encourage students to express themselves visually, which is a different skill from writing. Index. One-page autobiography. NAEP Shows Most Students Lack Writing Proficiency. Published Online: September 14, 2012 After decades of paper-and-pencil tests, the new results from the “nation’s report card” in writing come from a computer-based assessment for the first time, but only about one-quarter of the 8th and 12th graders performed at the proficient level or higher.
And the proficiency rates were far lower for black and Hispanic students. With the new National Assessment of Educational Progress in writing, students not only responded to questions and composed their essays on laptop computers, but also were evaluated on how frequently they used word-processing review tools like “spell check” and editing tools such as copying and cutting text. Tools for Teaching: The Amazing Sticky Note. This week, I watched a science teacher use sticky notes in a very creative way.
To check for understanding, the teacher gave each student a sticky note and asked each of her science students to give concrete examples of the vocabulary that they had learned in class. As the students exited the classroom, they placed the sticky note on the door. 163 Questions to Write or Talk About. Consortia Provide Preview of Common Assessments. Published Online: August 14, 2012 Published in Print: August 22, 2012, as Consortia Provide Preview of Common Tests Includes correction(s): August 27, 2013 As teachers begin shaping lessons for the common standards, many are wondering how to prepare their students for tests that won’t be ready for at least two years. But sample items being drafted for those exams offer early ideas of what lies ahead. Two large groups of states are using federal Race to the Top money to create new suites of exams for the Common Core State Standards.
Thoreau. Never look back unless you are planning to go that way."--Henry. Social Media: Nothing New? Commonplace Books As Predecessor to Pinterest. Before the affordability of personal libraries, and before people were able to access the world’s knowledge through the Internet, readers and writers had to find reasonable ways to consolidate and store information that could be useful to them.
There were no social media to help them aggregate and share stories, quotes, recipes, or images. That doesn’t mean they didn’t do exactly that. They created personal anthologies called commonplace books. Commonplace books functioned as literary scrapbooks filled with quotes, poems, proverbs, prayers, recipes, and letters. Each was a unique collection that reflected the interests of its creator. The first recorded commonplace books were created in fourteenth-century Italy. Commonplacing persisted as a popular study technique until the early 20th century.
Learning How to Write - Walt Gardner's Reality Check. So much of the criticism leveled at public schools today is focused on the deficits that students display in science and math. But I think doing so detracts attention from their equally disturbing shortcomings in writing. Perhaps my experience teaching English for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District at the same high school accounts for my concern.