Incorporate “Answer of the Day” in your morning-work routine

One teacher finds that the best way to get students to write great questions is to simply give them the answers!    read more...

Writing across the curriculum

Content-area teachers often cringe when administrators mandate a school improvement goal for writing across the curriculum. And they're right; you can't ask students to write personal narrative essays to explain the lab experiment they just completed in chemistry. But writing across the curriculum is so much more than simply adding an essay question to your latest chapter review test.    read more...

Engage more students with highlighter tape

West Side Middle School (Union City, IN) seventh grade teacher Carla Durham likes to engage her students with fun reader and writer tools in the classroom. One tool that she has found many uses for is highlighter tape.    read more...

Write strong 20-word summaries

Teachers want students to do more than just memorize facts in science and dates in social studies. They want their students to do more than just remember information in health or processes in FACS classes. What content area teachers really want is for students to see the bigger picture.    read more...

Strategies to help kids identify main ideas

When you ask students to tell you what a reading passage was about, it's not uncommon for kids to just start rattling off tiny little details. One way to combat this problem is to introduce the "fist list."    read more...

Life Maps produce writing topics and aid in reading comprehension

At the beginning of the year, look to provide students with ways to brainstorm potential writing topics based on personal life experiences. Have students draw a life map plotting places, people, holidays, vacations, events, and milestones in their lives for as far back as they remember.    read more...

Create simple summaries about main ideas

Main idea asks students to step back from the reading and to identify the gist of what something was about. What's the point? What's the big picture topic? Using the Information Pyramid, students are forced to think more inferentially and not to look for literal answers in the text.    read more...

3-D study guides make note taking fun

No matter what age you are teaching, everyone can find a use for a hands-on graphic organizer. After students have been introduced to a concept, the teacher would facilitate the students' construction and application of this three-dimensional organizer. Students can organize their newly learned information. Not only do these "foldables" provide students a hands-on study guide of their learning, but creating them is fun.    read more...

Writing from a different perspective

If you are looking for a way to have students write about a content area topic beyond a simple, predictable, regurgitated summary--- try this creative idea!    read more...

Challenging students to reference the text to support their thinking

A large portion of most state standardized tests include students writing an extended-response prompt. This requires students to read a passage and then write to a prompted topic. The bulk of a writer's score is based on how he supports his thinking with examples and evidence from the text.    read more...