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Tips To Have Students Ask Better Questions. Subtext – Engage Readers and Deepen Understanding. The next session I am attending is about Subtext, a tool I have been wanting to learn and explore. Check out their presentation materials here. “Subtext is a free iPad app that allows classroom groups to exchange ideas in the pages of digital texts. You can also layer in enrichment materials, assignments and quizzes—opening up almost limitless opportunities to engage students and foster analysis and writing skills.” Subtext allows students to engage deeper with reading material both individually as well as collaboratively. Subtext does work with Google Apps for Education!

Subtext allows you to personalize your reading experiences in the same way we see with other tools (change font size, highlight and tag, use a dictionary) but it also allows broader application – access your Google Docs, Search Google and copy to your Drive, etc. There are different ways to use subtext: Professional DevelopmentWhole School ReadsAccess Material Across CurriculumSupporting the Common CoreClose Reading. Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article. As children walk over the threshold into the school each morning, they are greeted by Jason with a smile. Next to him is a dry erase board and easel. There is a new handwritten message on it from Jason, cataloging simple things like the day of the week, an upcoming event, or a reason for the school community to celebrate.

Just as important, students are invited to start the day reflecting on their literacy with a question or prompt at the end of the board, with space to write about it so that their ideas can be read by other children as they enter the school. "It took awhile for students to become comfortable writing in that blank space on the message board, especially since the question changes every day," Jason explained to me later. "Now that they are into the routine of writing on the board, I find it's a wonderful source of data. These two girls are responding to the day's prompt: I admire the character ______ because _______. The concept of "first fruits" is powerful for me. Teaching Students To Think And Analyze. Relief for Reluctant Writers - Coach G's Teaching Tips. Online - Fifty Writing Tools.

At times, it helps to think of writing as carpentry. That way, writers and editors can work from a plan and use tools stored on their workbench. You can borrow a writing tool at any time. And here's a secret: Unlike hammers, chisels, and rakes, writing tools never have to be returned. They can be cleaned, sharpened, and passed on. Each week, for the next 50, I will describe a writing tool that has been useful to me.

I have borrowed these tools from writers and editors, from authors of books on writing, and from teachers and writing coaches. I have described most of these tools in earlier lists, first of 20 and then 30. As you study and discuss these, please remember: These are tools and not rules. My friend Tom French, who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, told me he liked my tool list because it covered writing from the "sub-atomic to the metaphysical level. " With that as both introduction and promise, let us begin. The 2 Sisters. Joan and Gail modeling The Daily 5™ Do you love teaching but feel exhausted from the energy you expend cajoling, disciplining and directing students on a daily basis?

Are you questioning the value of busy work but afraid that ceasing from such activities will lead to chaos in the classroom? Have you heard the phrase, “work smarter, not harder” but don’t have a clue how to start? If so, you’ll want to read this book! We set about designing a structure that would ensure all children were working at their level of challenge while taking responsibility for their learning and behavior, and that would provide meaningful instruction blocks without extensive preparation time for teachers. Thus The Daily 5™ was born. Based on literacy learning and motivation research, The Daily 5™ has been practiced and refined in our own classrooms for 10 years and shared with thousands of teachers throughout the United States. TheDailyCafe.com.

Writer's Workshop Resources and Ideas. The majority of time of Writing Workshop is devoted to independent writing. During this time, students are prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing their pieces. Depending on the age and abilities of your students, independent writing can be as short as 15 minutes or as long as 45-60 minutes. It helps to build stamina with your class, beginning with a short amount of time and building that time until they can work for up 30 minutes or more. According to Katie Wood Ray (The Writing Workshop, 2001), students can also do other activities during their writing time, such as writing in their schema notebooks journal writing writing exercises to experiment with language and style conducting peer-conferences reading to support writing During independent writing time, the teacher confers with students about their writing. Teachers should keep conferences short.

Websites on Conferring: Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article. As I continue to think about word study and what it means in the upper elementary grades, I can't help but remember David. I had David as a 4th grader. He was a great speller. He could spell almost anything, and always spelled every word on our required spelling inventory perfectly. My job was to support David where he was as a speller -- in his case, at the Derivational Stage. David's writing was always very linear.

This thinking led me to wonder where grammar instruction fits into a reading and writing workshop. By Jeff Anderson, I am working hard to embed this part of literacy instruction more authentically. In writing workshop, my students have always been comfortable listening to words and phrases we love. Beginning with Sentences As I continue to think about expanding my word study program to include a broader perspective of how we use words beyond just spelling, I've realized I've never taken it a step further to think about how authors craft sentences or phrases. Beach References. Guest Post | A Teenager on How Writing Helps Makes Sense of His Loss.

Youth CommunicationShateek Palmer Occasionally we collaborate with an organization called Youth Communication to feature true stories by young people that help add a new voice or angle to a topic we’re covering on this blog. Last year, for instance, teenagers from the organization wrote about Trayvon Martin and college debt. Below, an essay by Shateek Palmer, a student at Central Park East High School. It originally ran in Represent, a Youth Communication magazine by and for young people in foster care in New York City.

Shateek explains how writing has helped him express his emotions and feel less “alone in the world” since he was 9 years old. We publish it as part of our celebration of the National Day on Writing this week. Explaining My Life: Writing Makes Sense of My Losses By Shateek Palmer The first time I ever wrote about my feelings was when my grandmother was placed in the hospital. A week after she went to the hospital, my grandmother died when her liver gave out. A Bad Surprise. Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article. When I began teaching, Mark McGwire was breaking the home run record in major league baseball. We sat in the stands and cheered homeruns 67 and 68, awed by the consistency of the record-breaking power hitter.

A few months later I began my student teaching experience. I remember feeling frustrated because things didn’t always go as smoothly as I planned. My first few years of teaching I felt the same frustration. One evening I said to my husband, “I just want to get it right, but there are so many aspects of writing workshop, it’s hard to make them all work together.”

My practical husband said, “It’ll just take some time to gain experience.” “But I want everything perfect now.” He chuckled. “McGwire hit 70 homeruns last season.” “And he struck out 155 times. More than a decade later, his words still replay in my mind. . , Stacey Shubitz and I identified components of a successful workshop. Many components need to work together in order for writing workshop to run like a well-oiled machine. Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article. Last week Tammy joined a kindergarten teacher, Vicki Haley, for her writer's workshop. As we all know, the reality of kindergarten is that even with the best-laid plans we can get off schedule. When Tammy first arrived, Vicki apologized that she was a bit behind, and shared that her students were getting ready for show and tell. We had planned to focus our time on strategies for generating important topics for personal narrative stories in writer's workshop.

The level of excitement was too high to change direction, so we went with show and tell. Two sentences into the first show and tell, and we both knew that this was our opportunity for teaching. Acting Out the Story of Your Object At first, students just told about their object -- what it was, why they brought it, or where they got it. Teacher: So tell us what happened first. Student: Well I found this shell. Teacher: Show us how you found it. Student: I was walking on the beach. Student: My dad and my brother. Student: It hurt. Focusing Moments for Writers. One of the most powerful ways to help struggling writers is to help them to focus their stories.

I have been reading many samples of student work over the last week from across several grades and there is no doubt that children love to tell stories. I have read many accounts of car rides on the way to vacation followed by play-by-play, day-by-day accounts of the entire trip. In some of the narratives, I've even gotten to read about the car ride home right up until the garage closes behind them. I know that many of these students have had instruction on "seeds versus watermelons"-- one of my favorite third-grade lessons involves drawing a watermelon slice to represent a big idea such as "vacation" and all of the seeds represent the small moments of the vacation.

I know that our students have heard about small moments and the power of zeroing in on them as writers. Strong personal narratives, realistic fiction stories, and imaginative fiction stories generally: Teaching Authentic Writing in a Socially Mediated World. Email Share June 28, 2012 - by Susan Lucille Davis 122 Email Share I need to confess. As an English/Language Arts teacher with nearly three decades of experience teaching writing in her professional backpack, I am supposed to know what I am doing. But the radical changes in the way we communicate in contemporary society have led me to dive deep into an existential crisis.

What I Know and What I Don’t Know I know that a focus on building skills to communicate effectively in our media-driven, socially-networked world is more essential than ever. I should say, actually, that the problem is that I don’t know where to start. What about the Common Core State Standards? As I understand them, the Common Core standards still generally address writing in very traditional ways: as exposition, as narrative, and as analysis. My List of Contemporary Writing Activities Note that the Common Core emphasis on traditional rhetorical modes can be employed in many of these arenas. A Conundrum and a Sign of Hope. Try Wikibrains for Brainstorming. Wikibrains is a neat brainstorming website that I tried out a few months ago. Since then it has been revamped to make it easier to navigate and organize ideas.

The concept behind Wikibrains is this; when you brainstorm on Wikibrains you're also performing a basic Internet search at the same time. To create a brainstorm web on Wikibrains start by entering one word or phrase. When you enter a word you will be prompted to add more words by completing the phrase, "Makes me think off... " Each new word or phrase that you enter will be added to your web.

Wikibrains has private and public brainstorm webs. Applications for EducationsWikibrains could be a great tool to have students use as a story starter.