Visible Thinking Routines for Blogging Our school‘s fabulous PE teacher, Claire Arcenas, is bringing blogging to her PE classes. She is incorporating Visual Thinking Routines to help her students become reflective commenters. In a recent planning session, she reminded me of the book Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchard, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, that I had download but not read yet. The core routines are a set of seven or so routines that target different types of thinking from across the modules. Each one of these routines seemed well suited to help guide students in quality blog post writing as well as commenting. Here is our first attempt: Blogging as Information/Research Research- What have you read that has informed your position? Purpose– What kind of thinking is involved- To make sense of a concept that I am trying to understand or wrapping my mind around. Blogging as Reflection Blogging as Documentation Blog Commenting- Feedback- through strategic and thoughtful commenting routine.
Using Weather Symbols in Fiction Post and Artwork by Sylvia Nica, Age 14, USA Symbols. They may bring back memories of boring literature lectures, but they can be a great way to add meaning and depth to your writing. Like clues scattered around you writing, symbols can hint to your reader the meaning of an event or alter the mood of your story. So, let’s take a closer look at some of these weather symbols: Rain. Fog. Rainbow. While there are other weather symbols you can use in your writing, such as sun and snow, the ones above are common symbols many people will recognize. So how do you add these weather symbols into your writing? One way of incorporating these devices is to use a weather symbol to represent a certain event. You want to be careful that you don’t get too heavy with symbolism, or else your story will feel muddled and heavy. Sylvia is a writer who “draws inspiration from the world around her.”
Resources and Downloads for Teaching Critical Thinking Tips for downloading: PDF files can be viewed on a wide variety of platforms -- both as a browser plug-in or a stand-alone application -- with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Click here to download the latest version of Adobe Reader. Click on any title link below to view or download that file. Resources On This Page: Lesson Plans & Rubrics KIPP King Curriculum Planning Guide <img height="12" width="11" class="media-image media-element file-content-image" src="/sites/default/files/styles/content_image_breakpoints_theme_edutopia_desktop_1x/public/content/08/pdficon.gif? Back to Top Tools for Critical Thinking Scope and Sequence, Speech and Composition <img alt="" title="" class="media-image" width="11" height="12" src="/sites/default/files/styles/content_image_breakpoints_theme_edutopia_desktop_1x/public/content/08/pdficon.gif? Culture at KIPP
Color Symbolism - What Do Colors Symbolize? Since times immemorial, color symbolism has been used to depict beliefs, traditions, and behavior. Colors are used to represent life, death, fear, hatred, anger and joy. Most of the color symbolism represented today is handed down from generation to generation. Due to this fact, we often find that there is no uniformity in such color associations. People’s traditions, beliefs and values all play a role in these connections and associations. Take the example of weddings. Using Color Symbolism In many English speaking nations, commonly used phrases also depict color symbolism. Experts thus caution color symbolism to be used very carefully by firmly establishing the context. Color symbolism: Then and Now We take colors for granted. Today, there is a great deal of research being carried out on color symbolism and color associations. Color symbolism thus forms a huge part of our daily lives.
Critical Reading of an Essay's Argument Critical Reading of An Essay's Argument: Some logicians call it "critical reading." Others call it "close reading," or "active reading," or a host of other terms. All these labels refer to the same general process. Educated adults exist in a delusional state, thinking we can read. Mortimer Adler speaks of an experience while teaching an honors course that illustrates the problem perfectly: What I am going to report happened in a class in which we were reading Thomas Aquinas's treatise on the passions, but the same thing has happened in countless other classes with many different sorts of material. It was clear from context that the student above had read the entire work, and the student clearly understood the conclusion of Saint Thomas's argument. The act of reading to extract information and reading critically are vastly different. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. They have different goals. I. II. I know what your initial response is: "Five stages! I. A. B. C. II. A.
Color Symbolism in Literature: What Do Colors Mean in Literature and Poetry? Colors have been used in stories since as early as the first story was told. Writers and poets use colors to create concrete images of their characters, scenes and events.Language itself uses a system of symbols, either verbal or written. Therefore, color symbolism in literature imparts a deeper meaning to the words which, in turn, help transform the written content into a more powerful instrument. Naturally, the reader must also have prior experience with the color in order to interpret the symbolism (that the creator has in mind) correctly. This is the main reason why poems and books mean different things to different readers. Let us study different colors and what they mean in different forms of literature across the world. Color symbolism in French literature As early as the 12th century, French writers and poets used only 7 colors to depict romance, characters and emotions. Color symbolism in fairy tales Color symbolism in Gothic literature Symbolism of the color yellow in literature
The Passion of Flannery O’Connor - James Parker A prayer journal kept by the writer in her early 20s sheds new light on her biblical ironies. Kevin Christy How was the crowd at the Sermon on the Mount? When the son of God did stand-up for the multitudes, were there hecklers? Had Flannery O’Connor been on the scene, we can be sure, she would have reported it as some kind of freak-out, a dusty near-riot, not Woodstock but Altamont—scuffles, bad vibes, mic feedback. In O’Connor’s story “Revelation,” for instance, the pious Mrs. This month FSG publishes A Prayer Journal, the contents of a devotional notebook that O’Connor—a turbocharged Catholic—kept from January 1946 to September 1947, while she was a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Iowa was where spiky, brainy Mary Flannery O’Connor from Milledgeville, Georgia, became Flannery O’Connor, writer. “Smash the ego,” wrote Peter Schjeldahl in a 1979 poem called “I Missed Punk,” “which always reconstitutes / (and if it doesn’t, well, / your worries are over).” “A Circle in the Fire”
Top 11 Examples of Archetypes in Literature Archetypes are tools used in literature to represent common aspects of human nature and life in general. We often see archetypes clearly examined in older literature, but these archetypes continue to be used in all types of literature, from children's books to romance and fan fiction. While we study these archetypes in books, plays, and short stories from writers like Shakespeare, Dickens, and de Maupassant, modern writers can also use these representations of human nature to develop their own characters and plots. What are the archetypes in literature? There are two sets of archetypes in literature: Character and Situation. Character archetypes The hero The hero in a story can be male or female. All heroes share certain characteristics. In certain cases, heroes in stories are used to exhibit what a society's morals and values are. Some examples of heroes in literature are Beowulf, Harry Potter, Katniss from The Hunger Games series, and D'artagnan of The Three Musketeers. The mother figure
Using Google Docs for Rubrics At last year’s annual MassCUE conference, I went to a session presented by Katrina Kennett (@katrinakennett). Her presentation focused on how to use Google Docs to create rubrics, and she outlines the process in this video: She further explains her process and goals in this blog post. I was energized by the presentation and immediately implemented Google Spreadsheets to create my own rubrics. You can create self-grading rubrics if you like, or you can create rubrics that tally the number of rubric points and convert it to a grade. The first might save a little time, but the second allows you more control over the final grade. I had a little trouble figuring out what formula to use to convert total rubric points to grade. What I can’t seem to do with my rubric is determine what formula to put in one of the cells that will convert, say, 25 points to a 90 on an essay. I am sharing a link to a Google rubric I have created combining Katrina’s method with the Greece Schools’ rubric.
Character Archetypes: Enriching your Novel's Cast The best-loved fiction for children, teens and adults shares characters who feel familiar. This is because effective characters often have strong archetypal qualities. They have combinations of fears and goals – character psychology – we’ve seen before. What are character archetypes, exactly, and how can you use them to make your novel’s cast more interesting? Defining character archetypes The first definition of the word ‘archetype’ is ‘a very typical example of a certain person or thing.’ ‘Character archetypes’ are thus the blueprints for characters that we draw on. A third definition of archetype comes from psychoanalysis, the study of human psychology. Why are character archetypes useful for writers? Archetypes recur and repeat in fiction because they mimic real people’s similarities and differences. Take, for example, A.A. What Milne’s characters illustrate (and why they feel so real and ‘knowable’) is the dominant, archetypal aspects of our personalities.
Reading & Reacting: 10 Ways Literacy Narratives Will Rock Your World (or at least your writing classroom) | Haas | Learning By Deanna Mascle @ Metawriting It is not often that I respond to posts from individual blogs, usually opting for more mainstream, published current educational fair instead. In an effort to branch out a bit more and look for some more positive material, I love this piece about literacy narratives. Anyone not checking on Deanna Mascle’s Metawriting should consider dropping by from time to time – good stuff. In this post, she glowingly praises the benefits of the literacy narrative as a writing task. Literacy narratives are powerful tools that can help students learn about themselves as literate people, as both consumers and producers of the written word in all its forms, and as such provides a key intervention tool for students struggling with literacy demons. This last sentence is quite beautiful and a definite factor in the likelihood that I will be asking students to write a literacy narrative in the near future. Of particular interest to me are the first three items.