If You Teach or Write 5-Paragraph Essays--Stop It! | The White Rhino: A Chicago Latino English Teacher. Part I: Introduction--What inspired my argumentative response? For decades, too many high-school teachers have been instilling persuasive writing skills by teaching students the five-paragraph essay. You know it: Introduction with three reasons Reason #1 Reason #2 Reason #3 A summary of all three reasons It's bad writing. The five-paragraph essay is rudimentary, unengaging, and useless. If I were using five paragraphs to convince you, based on the argument above, you wouldn't need to read any farther. Aristotle became one of the godfathers of rhetoric by creating structures for persuasive writing and speaking that--if taught to young people today--would transform writing instruction and facilitate the implementation of the Common Core, proving that students--when guided appropriately--can succeed with critical thinking in the 21st century.
Part 2: Background--What preceded my argument and / or what needs to be clarified? Part 3: Confirmation--What supports my argument? I know. Infographic: Note taking. "7 Elements of a Differentiated Writing" Teacher modeling of writing is missing in most of the classrooms I observe. I'm out to personally change that. I learned the amazing power of sharing your own writing process with students many years ago, and I haven't looked back since. In the fall of 1996, I returned to my classroom a changed teacher.
I had a brand new car with both lots of horsepower and an electric sunroof--a personal dream fulfilled! The most important trick learned was this: be a writer too. I have to tell you it was amazingly hard, but I did it. As teachers, we're funny; we model reading strategies, and that's not hard for us. At right, you will find the first piece of writing that I shared with my new poetry elective class that Fall. That summer institute I took back in 1996 actually started my path to my Master's Degree.
For that mythology elective, I had my best experience with sharing writing I was doing for my Master's Program. There's such simple power in sharing your own writing with your students. The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative. Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing. I like to imagine a sentence as a boat. Each sentence, after all, has a distinct shape, and it comes with something that makes it move forward or stay still — whether a sail, a motor or a pair of oars. There are as many kinds of sentences as there are seaworthy vessels: canoes and sloops, barges and battleships, Mississippi riverboats and dinghies all-too-prone to leaks. And then there are the impostors, flotsam and jetsam — a log heading downstream, say, or a coconut bobbing in the waves without a particular destination.
My analogy seems simple, but it’s not always easy to craft a sentence that makes heads turn with its sleekness and grace. Over the course of several articles, I will give you the tools to become a sentence connoisseur as well as a sentence artisan. Library of Congress But that definition misses the essence of sentencehood. For a sentence to be a sentence we need a What (the subject) and a So What (the predicate). Sentences Crisp, Sassy, Stirring. Writing - other. Fifteen Writing Exercises. Writing exercises are a great way to increase your writing skills and generate new ideas. They give you perspective and help you break free from old patterns and crutches. To grow as a writer, you need to sometimes write without the expectation of publication or worry about who will read your work. Don’t fear imperfection. That is what practice is for. Pick ten people you know and write a one-sentence description for each of them.
Focus on what makes each person unique and noteworthy. Record five minutes of a talk radio show. Write a 500-word biography of your life. Write your obituary. Write a 300-word description of your bedroom. Write an interview with yourself, an acquaintance, a famous figure or a fictional character. Read a news site, a newspaper or a supermarket tabloid. Write a diary or a blog of a fictional character. Rewrite a passage from a book, a favorite or a least favorite, in a different style such as noir, gothic romance, pulp fiction or horror story.
Teaching Authentic Writing in a Socially Mediated World - Getting Smart by Susan Lucille Davis - common core, DigLN, engchat. 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. Prewriting Graphic Organizers. Cliche Finder. Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use? Are you searching for a cliché using the word "cat" or "day" but haven't been able to come up with one? Just enter any words in the form below, and this search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase... Over 3,300 clichés indexed!
What exactly is a cliche? See my definition Do you know of any clichés not listed here? Add some to the list! This is Morgan, creator of the Cliche Finder. Or, you might like my crazy passion project: Spanish for Nerds: Learning Spanish via Etymologies! Back to cliches... if you would like to see some other Web sites about clichés? © S. Special thanks to Damien LeriAnd to Mike Senter Morgan's Web page.
Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies. Welcome to the Purdue University Online Writing Lab (OWL) Essay%20Rubric. Kelly Gallagher – Resources. Part of the reason my students have such a hard time reading is because they bring little prior knowledge and background to the written page. They can decode the words, but the words remain meaningless without a foundation of knowledge. To help build my students’ prior knowledge, I assign them an "Article of the Week" every Monday morning.
By the end of the school year I want them to have read 35 to 40 articles about what is going on in the world. It is not enough to simply teach my students to recognize theme in a given novel; if my students are to become literate, they must broaden their reading experiences into real-world text. Below you will find the articles I assigned* this year (2013-2014) to my students. "How Earth Got Its Tectonic Plates/On Saturn's Moon Titan, Scientists Catch Waves in Methane Lakes" by Monte Morin for the Los Angeles Times and by Amina Kahn for the Los Angeles Times, respectively "Hard Evidence: Are We Beating Cancer?
" 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing. Summary: Few sources available today offer writing teachers such succinct, practice-based help—which is one reason why 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing was the winner of the Association of Education Publishers 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award for Instructional Materials. The National Writing Project's 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing offers successful strategies contributed by experienced Writing Project teachers. Since NWP does not promote a single approach to teaching writing, readers will benefit from a variety of eclectic, classroom-tested techniques. These ideas originated as full-length articles in NWP publications (a link to the full article accompanies each idea below). Table of Contents: 30 Ideas for Teaching Writing 1. Use the shared events of students' lives to inspire writing. When a child comes to school with a fresh haircut or a tattered book bag, these events can inspire a poem.
ROTKOW, DEBBIE. 2003. Back to top 2. MURAR, KAREN, and ELAINE WARE. 1998. 3. WAFF, DIANE. 1995. 4. Quality Rubrics / Checklist_v_Rubric. What deserves a rubric? A good starting point when thinking about what tasks deserves a rubric, is to reflect on the nature of the task. What are your goals for you and your students? If your goal is to provide answers to the following questions, a checklist or scoring chart may be the best assessment tool: What do I need to do to pass? If your goal is to provide answers to the following questions, a rubric is probably the best fit: What does quality look like for this task or process? You may find these questions helpful if you've already created a document and are wondering if it "counts" as a rubric or it can better be classified a scoring chart.
Designed with the goal of communicating expectations, Quality Rubrics take time to write, requiring student input, the use of anchors and exemplars, and most likely, multiple drafts. Finally, use point systems for items that can only be right or wrong, such as computation problems or spelling words. Checklist versus Rubric versus Point System. Ambiguous Words. 501 Writing Prompts. Writing /communication. Persuasive Writing. Writing project. This piece is about collecting stories and ideas from life and from the internet. Writer Jonathan Harris, in this TED Talk explains his unique vision of how stories can be found in the artifacts left on a street corner, harvested from blogs with with bots, or captured by camera while exploring Inuit whaling camps in Barrow Alaska. The talk ends with a photo essay themed on happiness and wishes found in the Kingdom of Bhutan.
Harris interviewed over a hundred folks found along the paths of Bhutan. He asked each to write one wish on a balloon. The imagery and ideas are good to think about. This man creates technology generated mind-maps that go way beyond the solo clustering we sometimes teach as idea generation. Harris is a traveler, thinker, and creator.
Video: Jonathan's website: Writing Exercises. 6 traits of writing. 6+1 Trait® Writing Assessment Lesson Plans | Education Northwest. Submitted by NWREL Staff Name: Bad Analogies Traits: Ideas, Sentence Fluency Grade Level: Middle School (6-8), High School (9-12) Time: Two or more class periods Supplies:Examples (in pdf file) of bad and good analogies, writing materialsLesson Description: 1) This lesson should follow discussion and activities relating to literary terms. 2) Students are bound to write some bad analogies on their own, so this lesson brings them out into the open where everyone can have some fun with them. 3) Share some example of both good and bad analogies--what makes the good ones good, what makes the bad ones bad.
Have the students start by attempting to write some bad analogies--comparisons that restate/overstate the obvious, are too obscure, or too funny/odd for the reader to make the conection intended by the writer. Share these aloud and put them on notecards for display.