Writing
Writing Grants
From the desk Carol C… Writing grants always seemed like such a daunting task to me. The only ones I knew anything about were federal ones where the application was long and required an enormous amount of documentation. Then a local grant from the Winston Salem Foundation came across my desk. I decided to fill…
Read MoreKeeping a Journal
From the desk of Carol C… I’ve thought a lot recently about students and journaling. At first my thoughts were all over the place. Then I began to narrow my focus by asking myself: What do I mean by the word “journal”? What would be the purpose of having students keep one? Possible purposes of…
Read MoreRead. Analyze. Emulate.
From the desk of Alice… In case you missed it, Kelly Gallagher was in town this week and did a workshop related to reading and writing. I love it when we are able to bring high quality educators and authors to the area so I can learn from them. Kelly had many useful tips for…
Read MoreTeaching the Reader
From the desk of Karen… Educators talk a lot about shifts these days: changing outdated teaching habits, aligning our work with brain research, learning to make our teaching stronger. Well, this is a major, earthquake-shattering shift for many. “I am not simply teaching the reading; I am teaching the reader.” ~Kelly Gallagher Teaching the reading…
Read MoreSeize the Opportunity
From the desk of Carol C… You have the opportunity to go to Hawaii, and everything for you is free. Would you take it? What about Paris, London, Rome, or southern Germany free of charge? Pearl Harbor, the Louvre, Tower of London, or Bavaria. Of course you would. It would be the opportunity of a…
Read MoreAssessing Writing
From the desk of Carol C… Recently I’ve noticed in many classrooms where writing seems to have taken a back seat to reading and math. The reason, I think, is that school systems and the state have emphasized these two subjects more than any others. However, the performance tasks in the Common Core exemplars are…
Read MoreReading in 8th Grade and Beyond
From the desk of Ailce… My youngest children are 5 year old twins on the verge of Kindergarten. They naturally love books and without prompting will crawl into someone’s lap to hear a story or book about something they are interested in. They ask questions about pictures, words, make predictions, infer and generally throw themselves…
Read MoreWriting Across the Curriculum
From the desk of Carol C… Writing across the curriculum…it’s a phrase we hear often these days. Any grade level can look through the exemplars and see the level of rigor expected in writing assignments in all areas, not just Language Arts. The first step in helping students attain these expected levels is to make…
Read MoreFinding Freedom in Poetry Writing
From the desk of Katie M… When people think of poetry they always think rhyme but that’s not always true. There are many different types of poems like free verse, cinquain, haiku, lyrical, concrete and so on. None of those besides lyric actually has to rhyme. This is important to tell your writers! I…
Read MorePublishing
From the desk of Carol C…. Publishing was hard for me for a long time, and I never had it down to a science. I think it had something to do with the way writing was taught when I first started teaching. Assign the topic, students write, students turn in their papers, teachers correct the…
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