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...

Beginnings & endings are crucial on state writing tests

The state standardized writing prompts are just around the corner. Knowing that, it's time to take stock. Last month we targeted one of the top two reasons students were falling short of passing scores -- their writing is too short and lacks development. In this edition, let's dive into the second most common reason students don't pass--- their writing lacks cohesiveness or completeness. In other words, they don't have the 3-part combination including a beginning, middle and end.    read more...

Strengthen student titles

It seems rather insignificant, but there is great power in teaching young writers about titles. For a kindergartner, the title is the first beginning they write. Eventually, as writers develop, a title becomes the attention grabbing words before the first sentence.    read more...

Target list-making as a writing genre

Before early writers create sentences, they write words. Instead of turning those few words into a simple sentence, encourage students to write with more details, more words and create more powerful lists.    read more...

Find poems in previous writings

Poems often tell stories. So why not utilize previous writings your students have generated when teaching your next poetry unit?    read more...

Improving students’ self-assessment after writing

When teachers announce a new writing assignment, or a specific writing project, or even a single writing prompt, there are often multiple tasks for students to juggle. The teacher carefully and explicitly goes over every single required component and verifies that students understand the expectations. And yet, when the assignments are turned in, invariably, there are numerous writings that lack all the required components. Ugh!    read more...

Writing endings that don’t merely summarize

The sign of a strong ending or conclusion is not necessarily one that fits a 3-5 sentence recipe. We've all read great endings that were one sentence long and great endings that were five sentences long. We've all read wretched endings that were one sentence long and wretched endings that were five sentences long. A great ending has nothing to do with how long the ending is, but rather how satisfied it leaves the reader.    read more...

Stronger literature responses with the 6 Traits

Writing about your reading is a typical expectation in middle school writing. But beyond a summary of the reading, Language Arts teachers often work to develop students’ ability to respond to the literature. This might include drawing connections among texts, analyzing the text for figurative language, critiquing the text for a particular characteristic, using the text to support a specific opinion, etc. But what do you do when students repeatedly write weak literature responses? How do you elicit stronger ones?    read more...

Jumpstarting a nonfiction/research unit

Jumpstarting a nonfiction/research unit is a popular topic with many teachers. Several of you emailed excited to dive into a nonfiction writing unit, so I thought I'd give you a couple additional ideas this fuel the fire.    read more...

Preparing for research papers

For intermediate and secondary teachers, second semester curriculum often includes the "research paper unit." With this comes the usual woes of teaching students how to organize note cards, paraphrase, and draft a strong thesis statement.    read more...