background preloader

Literacy

Facebook Twitter

Three lessons from the science of how to teach writing | Education By The Numbers. What’s the best way to teach writing? The experts have many answers — and they often contradict each other. In contrast to the thousands of studies on effective methods for teaching reading and mathematics, there are relatively few rigorous studies on writing instruction. That’s partly because it’s time-consuming and expensive to assess writing quality in a way that can be quantitatively measured. Commonly, researchers come up with an eight-point scale. They write descriptions and sample essays to show what each score involves. Then they train teams of graders to score properly and consistently. But writing quality is ultimately a subjective judgment. Steve Graham, a professor of education at Arizona State University, has made a career out of monitoring research studies on teaching writing, to figure out which methods actually work.

This article also appeared here. But there are effective practices where the research is unequivocal. Here are three: 1. Why so little writing? 2. 3. The Daily Post | The Art and Craft of Blogging. Comments4Kids. Safe and simple blogs for your students. What is 100WC? - 100 Word Challenge100 Word Challenge. ‘The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp.

The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story.’ Ursula K. Le Guin We ask children to write in school but often there is no apparent purpose that they can see other than pleasing their teacher! This can prompt some very reluctant writers in our classrooms. The 100 Word Challenge seeks to address this problem. It is a weekly creative writing challenge for children under 16 years of age. By setting a limited word count with a focused theme and a guaranteed audience beyond the class teacher, children have far greater motivation for writing. One of the special things about 100WC is that those entering a piece are encouraged to visit other blogs and leave a constructive comment. The 100 Word Challenge has been used for homework tasks and up leveling practice as well as a regular writing activity.

Above all – it is fun!

Digital Storytelling.

Word Wizard - Talking Movable Alphabet & Spelling Tests for Kids. Book Creator for iPad - create ebooks and pdfs, publish to iBooks. Blogging.