K-12 Rubrics | Common Core State Standards The Common Core State Standards have made it even more important for educators to assist students in making the connections between writing and reading through thoughtful and well-planned instruction, assignments and feedback. The Elk Grove Unified School District (EGUSD) created Common Core State Standards-aligned writing rubrics as a resource to assist teachers with this work. These rubrics are intended to help in instructional planning and to provide guidance in assisting students with the writing process. Permission to Use EGUSD Rubrics EGUSD’s CCSS writing rubrics have been requested by school districts and teachers across the nation and the world. Elk Grove Unified has provided our CCSS Rubrics below in Acrobat .pdf format with our district’s watermark and in Microsoft Word .doc format without. EGUSD CCSS Rubrics by Elk Grove Unified School District is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Downloadable Rubrics Kindergarten.pdf | .doc
Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology 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:
The Vermont Writing Collaborative: Writing for Understanding Over 100 ideas for using Twitter in the Classroom This handful of resources provide about 100 different ideas for, and examples of, using Twitter in the classroom. It’s been almost 8 months since I published the post, “6 Examples of Using Twitter in the Classroom”, about uses of the popular micro-blogging tool in the instructional setting. This post generated a lot of traffic, and continues to attract hundreds of viewers every week. Since that brief posting, I’ve come across a lot of articles containing examples and suggestions for using Twitter in instructional applications. I’ve combed through many of these and tried to boil down the redundancies to create a rich set of idea-laden resources. I also want to mention these 100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics, which are worth reviewing to learn more and plan your approach to using Twitter in (and out of) the classroom. Here are the original “6 Examples” from last June’s post: About Kelly Walsh Print This Post
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. Debbie Rotkow, a co-director of the Coastal Georgia Writing Project, makes use of the real-life circumstances of her first grade students to help them compose writing that, in Frank Smith's words, is "natural and purposeful." ROTKOW, DEBBIE. 2003. Back to top 2. 3. 4.
An Original Writer's Notebook Lesson from Corbett For this lesson's notebook page, after we explore Pat Benatar's metaphor in her song "Love is Battlefield," my students create original and interesting metaphors for the topic of love in their writer's notebooks; on a notebook page, each metaphor is established and extended upon with two details. Once students have practiced extending original love metaphors, they are asked to create new metaphors over the month that are more appropriate to their other core content areas: math, science, and social studies. Once a week in Language Arts class, students polish a new metaphor they have created outside of English class, then publish and illustrate it on a designated page in their writer's notebook. After the two-page notebook spread is complete, students can be reminded/prompted to use more metaphors during writing or during processing in the future. In 2012, I added a poetry extension lesson, which you can find below in the write-up. Idea #1...Teaching a Four-Metaphor Poem From day
Gluten-Free Chocolate Biscotti Intro I was both honored and slightly frightened when Shauna (Gluten-Free Girl) asked me to bake a Gluten-Free Thanksgiving recipe. I’ve made a few gluten-free items before but they were completely flour-free. This time I wanted to challenge myself and have fun playing with completely new-to-me flours. Now I understand that you may be confused as to why I chose Biscotti as a Thanksgiving baked good. As I mentioned in my last post I don’t do much of the cooking on Thanksgiving. But what I can bring is a little sweet snack for the busy cooks. My husband was leery of my biscotti. So after biting into my biscotti his once timid and frightened face brightened as the texture was pleasantly softer than most while still maintaining the likable sturdiness associated with this Italian treat. There was a nice crunch from the coarsely ground almonds that made up the almond flour. Gluten-Free Chocolate Biscotti 1/2 cup almond flour* 1/4 cup sorghum flour 1/4 cup cocoa powder 1/4 cup potato starch
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Writing Assessments Information and Opinion Writing Continuums We have recently developed two new writing continua, one for opinion/argument writing and one for informational writing. These continua are closely aligned to the narrative continuum both in content and structure, with twelve levels (Levels 11-12 forthcoming) for grades K-8, and language designed to support teachers in assessing writing and developing teaching points. Studied side by side, the three continua show how the different types of writing are connected and how work in one bolsters the others. Narrative Writing Continuum The Narrative Writing Continuum provides you with a rough draft tool for assessing narrative writing. The tool also helps you as an individual teacher and your school as a whole keep your eyes on the goal of teaching writers, not improving written products. This tool has not been published in book format for a reason. There is another limitation to the tool.
No Bake Chocolate Cake Recipe I don't know about you, but I didn't accomplish much today. I slept in, halfheartedly ran a few errands, accumulated flowers wherever I went, and spent a good amount of time arranging poppies & peonies into a hodgepodge of mason jars and vases. Flowers aside, I dedicated ten minutes making this chocolate cake. It's the ultimate lazy chocolate dessert. This is the sort of thing I'll throw together if we're having friends over for dinner and I run out of steam on the dessert front. The choice of pan warrants a mention. butter, to grease pan 8 ounces / 225 g 70% chocolate, well chopped 8 ounces / 225 g heavy cream 1/2 teaspoon allspice (optional) 2 teaspoons finely ground espresso (optional) 1/4 teaspoon fine grain salt cocoa powder, to serve Lightly butter a 6-inch / 15cm springform pan or equivalent - I typically use little loaf pans which are less common, but many small pans will work here (see main entry). Barely melt the chocolate in a double boiler over gentle heat. Serves 12.
Imagination Prompt Generator: Random Writing Blog Prompts, Writer's Prompt Tool Writing Prompts : The Imagination Prompt Generator As featured on Blogger's Buzz! Take as much time with each prompt as you need, or set a 10-minute writing timer. Your first "Imagination Prompt" appears above. Are you looking for some random writing prompts or story starters for your journal, blog, or other creativity-related project? Creativity Portal's Imagination Prompt Generator will inspire you by outputting one of many randomly generated "Imagination Prompts" at the press of a button. More Writing and Blogging Prompts »
Wheat Belly | Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight elearningvt.org Welcome to the future of Middle School The Tarrant Institute partners with middle schools to improve the education of young adolescents in Vermont through technology-rich learning. What We Offer We've under-written the rollout of 1:1 internet-enabled devices to our partnering iLeap schools, and continue to provide funding for technology innovations within our cohort. We also provide principal and administrative and leadership team consultations and seminars to help move Vermont's middle schools toward a technology-rich, student-centered outcome. Find out more Over on the blog: Authentic cell biology with iPads This spring, Nancy Spencer and her class discovered something amazing about their cheek cells. The students discovered that by placing the lens of their iPad cameras directly against the eye-piece of a microscope, they were able to take photos of cells that had, until five minutes earlier, been a part of their bodies. Read the rest on our blog