I am always looking for ways to engage my learners with post-reading or reading response activities. I have students write literary analysis paragraphs and essays as a response to reading, and there is most certainly a place for this activity in any ELA classroom. But, with distance learning I found it ever more difficult to truly engage my students in that task. I searched for ways to get my students reflecting on their reading; analyzing the texts, citing textual evidence, and creating commentary about that text. Essentially, I wanted the elements of a good literary analysis packaged in an engaging activity. So, I turned to social media!
Read moreTeaching Social Justice Through To Kill a Mockingbird
I’m not sure that any name resonates with me quite the way that Atticus Finch does. I said the name to another English teacher today, and she put her hand over her heart and made a pitter-patter motion. In this moment her body language said it all, and frankly, I completely agreed with the sentiment.
Read moreFormal Writing Lesson - Tips and Tricks to Teaching Formal Writing
Do you ever feel like you’ve got a one-track mind? As an English teacher, I feel like I tend to focus on just one thing at a time. If we are teaching sentence patterns, I’m all in on sentence patterns, or if we are learning citations, I am laser-focused on citations. Some people may praise my dedication and focus, but I’m not sure my one-track mind is always a good thing because while I may understand the why and how about the lesson or rule I’m teaching on, but sometimes students need to be taught the why and how explicitly.
Read more5 Must-Have Activities for any Poetry Unit
As teachers, we all have our tendencies. We like to teach certain books, watch specific versions of films or plays, and teach content in our particular way. Every teacher I've ever met has certain things they do for individual units, and just as some teachers have must-read novels before graduating high school, I have must-have components for teaching poetry.
Read moreUsing Stations in the Secondary ELA Classroom
Stations are not just for elementary classrooms! They are an excellent way to increase engagement in the secondary ELA classroom.
My favorite ways to included stations:
Mentor Text Stations
Grammar Stations
Vocabulary Stations
Peer Editing Stations
Carousel Brainstorming Stations
Gallery Walk Stations
Teaching Tone and Mood with Blackout Poetry
A few years ago, I had a truly game-changing ‘aha’ moment I had several struggling students in my class. The ones that never seemed interested in my content. They often missed assignments and needed re-direction, after school sessions, the concerned phone calls home… you’ve been there. I tried everything I could to engage their interest. I opened up book choice, forgoing a whole class novel. I let them write an argument on any topic of their choice, played interactive grammar games, but my bag of tricks didn’t work with this particular group of students. Then, one day I introduced blackout poetry.
I walked by this group of friends, sitting together as they worked on their poems, pausing quickly to check on their status just like any other day. I stopped dead in my tracks. I was floored. My mouth agape. Their work could have been displayed in an art museum instead of the cement walls of my classroom it was destined for.
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Avoid These Common Pitfalls with One Pagers
Recently, I found a new love… a new teaching strategy that became a game changer for me and my students. The One Pager. Have you heard of these? One pager activities allow students to show what they know about a specific topic all on one singular page. The key element that separates these one pagers from any other assignment, is the combination of their written reflections/understandings and art. Students creatively display their knowledge with text, drawings, color, and any other elements that showcase their knowledge.
I love how these display a combination of their artistic talent, symbols from the texts, and their written interpretations and understandings. They are still completing a rhetorical analysis or a literary analysis, but they also get to showcase their creativity. Engagement soars! My students have not gotten excited for their rhetorical analysis assessments. And… that excites me!
That said, with all this love for one pager activities, I will share the two pitfalls that I, myself, fell into when I started using one pagers.
Read moreRhetorical Analysis - a Fun Acronym and 5 Mini-Lessons to Get You Started!
Teachers are professional acronym and mnemonic device creators. Love them or leave them, acronyms and mnemonic devices are important, well-supported learning strategies, and I have found them to be particularly useful when teaching students about arguments and persuasion.
When I introduce the many pieces of rhetorical analysis to my students, I use the term SMELL to focus their learning. It is not a surprise that teenagers find my SMELL-y mnemonic device entertaining, and several snickers are shared as I introduce it, but it's memorable, and that is what matters. I tell my students we are going to SMELL out an author's argument (complete with a slide with a large nose on it). In my class, we use SMELL to analyze and evaluate an author's argument, the logic of their reasoning, and the relevance of their evidence. In case you were wondering what the letters mean, let me enlighten you.
Read more3 Unique, Creative, and Collaborative Mini-Lessons for Teaching Characterization
Over the past several years, I have been looking for methods, lessons, activities, games, etc… that will truly engage my students in their learning. I have been working to become the ‘guide on the side’ rather than the ‘sage on the stage’ as they say. Through this blog, I share that journey and the ideas and lessons gained with you. From voice and choice to meaningful learning games, my hope is to share out the methods that are truly working to engage students in an ever distracting world of instant gratification and low motivation.
Read moreTheme Tracking - an Engaging and Scaffolded Method to Help Students Analyze Theme!
If you are anything like me, the first question I generally ask students after we finish reading a text is, ‘what was the theme?’ I find that students need some support at the middle/high school level with crafting a great theme statement as they tend to want to identify the theme topic, instead of the message that goes with that topic. They might suggest that the theme of To Kill a Mockingbird is social injustice, but what I am looking for is that full sentence message about social injustice.
Where my students really struggled, however, was in the analysis of that theme statement. The found it very difficult to trace the development of the theme over the course of a text. Discussing how the author developed that theme stumped many of my students. They searched endlessly and haphazardly to find meaningful evidence from the text. It was through their challenges that my approach to teaching theme changed. Instead of finishing the text and then asking this question, I began asking this question before we even started reading.
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10 Mini-Lessons for Teaching Literary Analysis
As soon as I would say the word “analysis” in my classroom, my students would groan, slumping down in their chairs, flailing their hands for dramatic effect. I get it. Writing responses to literature can be difficult, even for high school students. This was especially true when the analysis didn’t have a specific prompt for students to follow. They became overwhelmed, unsure of where to start. It was when I started teaching how each element fits together in a narrative that they started to really produce incredible pieces of writing focused on a true analysis of the text. They started explaining how the dynamic characters and their conflicts throughout a story shape the theme. Papers had quotations, with correct citations, as evidence to support their claims. My students were excited about what they were learning and writing!
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