More than happy, glad, sad, mad

If you ask students to identify how a character is feeling in a story, you might hear one of the following four words pop up: happy, sad, glad, mad. Character emotions and traits are not something children automatically understand. To help students with this, we need to be intentional.    read more...

Write about convention characters

Students need to understand the purpose of punctuation marks before they will utilize them accurately, intentionally, and consistently. That said, consider challenging students to think of a punctuation mark as a person and the role it plays in writing.    read more...

The Test Lady Lives!

The Test Lady is alive! WOW! The creativity in your mini-lessons on the Test Lady was astounding.    read more...

Using the Smekens’ voice poster to teach word choice

Here's a terrific idea from Jordana Anderson (Aylesworth Elementary, Portage, IN) for teaching both voice and word choice.    read more...

Spice up subject area writing with “point of view”

To add a little life into your content-area writings, students may appreciate playing with voice. Beyond just writing explanatory pieces to the teacher, develop a writing task that allows students to use their content knowledge by writing as if they were a particular object.    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...

Motivate your writers by using “My Space”

For those of you trying desperately to motivate apathetic students at this point in the year, tap into their enthusiasm for digital technology. Mark Sopko, River Forest Jr/Sr HS teacher (Hobart, IN), asks students to develop mock MySpace pages for different characters in their literature.    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...

Where’s the Test Lady?

In preparing his 4th graders for the Indiana writing assessment this fall, David Henry (teacher at Sweetser Elementary in Sweetser, IN) shared my idea of the "Test Lady" with his students -- that a particular woman who lives in the state capitol scores all their state writing prompts.    read more...

Letter writing builds a sense of audience and teaches personification

A sense of audience increases the writer's care-about-it factor. It gives them a more purposeful reason to write.    read more...