Your Students Should Be Writing to Authors You work hard to make sure your students are passionate readers. You make sure high-quality books line the shelves of your classroom library, even when they cost more than your monthly paycheck. So when you see a student who seems to have fallen in love with an author, it kind of takes your breath away, right? Writers can change a person’s worldview. Social media is such a constant presence that it can be easier and quicker to just send a tweet to your favorite author or Instagram a photo of you with their book in hand. Recently I read a book put out by Candlewick Press called Journeys: Young Readers’ Letters to Authors Who Changed Their Lives. Here’s an excerpt from one letter sprung from The Lions of Little Rock: “Dear Kristin Levine, … I am black. Help your students connect to the writers that open up new spaces for them. Tell them their voice matters. Readers make up half the story. Explain that they might not get a reply. Don’t let this stop your students from writing.
A Busy Two Days « reflectionsonedtech August 14, 2012 by birdsallb We’ve completed two of three days of our “Becoming a Connected Educator” course at school.Working with these fascinating and smart friends, colleagues, and amazing teachers is so fun. I’m able to learn alongside them and marvel at the reflection and dialogue amongst the group. After two days the teachers are now on Twitter, using Hootsuite, have Diigo accounts and have joined and are sharing bookmarks to our Diigo group for the class. Today we used a Google Hangout to have a conversation with Peter Skillen (@peterskillen) and Brenda Sherry (@brendasherry). Our group checked out the #edchat at noon today. Later in the day we talked about blogging and especially blogging with students. Tomorrow we ponder the beginning of the school year and what being connected, to whatever extent we are at that point, looks like for us as educators and with our students. It’s going well. Image: Creative Commons/flickr by Frank2216 Like this:
Essay Writing Guide made by academic writers | EssayPro Table Of Contents What Is The Aim Of This Guide? Our goal is to orient you as quickly and appropriately as possible on how to write an essay. What Is The Purpose? This guide was created by our writers to teach people how to write various types of essays, regardless of the requirements. Generally, an essay can have many purposes, but despite all of these, the structure will remain the same no matter what. Follow these steps to write an essay, or visit EssayPro for additional help: Decide On Topic Choosing a good topic is important because your entire body of work will be based around it. Conduct A Research Gather and analyze information from external sources (documents, web articles, encyclopedias, etc.) for your essay. Develop a Thesis A thesis statement is a short statement, commonly one sentence, that defines the main idea or claim of an essay, research paper, etc. Create An Outline An outline is a way to organize and structure your essay in a proper way. Introduction Body Paragraph(s) Conclusion
Dig Deeper Into Poetry With Close Reads Over the past few weeks my students have been studying the poetry genre. My third graders have truly loved reading and writing poems. They quickly anointed authors like Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky, who entertained them with hilarious prose, as their favorite poets of all time. I was thrilled that a few days into this unit students began arriving at school each morning with poetry books, pages bookmarked, asking if they could share a few poems with the class. Of course they could! While they were loving poetry and reading it voraciously, I realized my students were only just scratching the surface — looking for funny content without truly understanding a poem’s meaning or the poet’s message. Getting Started — Not Quite as Easy as I Thought My students are familiar with close-reading strategies. Trying to apply the close-reading strategies I use with fiction and nonfiction text to poetry was a lot like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Modeling On Their Own Success! Genia
Scaffolds Critical Thinking and Enables Flipped Learning 1 reading tool for the whole school, customized by level and subject. College Readiness Self-directed Research Content-Area Literacy Social Studies, ELA, Foreign Language: Spanish, French, Gaelic, Arabic... Teacher Prof. Development Apply classroom learning to the real world. Build case studies together. Flip your class with 1 tool for both video and text. While great for reading, you can also Ponder any video you browse to on YouTube, Vimeo or Dropbox! Engage in sophisticated dialogue without the bottleneck of writing.