What would happen if we let students choose everything they read in our-their English class? In the past, I would begin every school year with a shared text. My thinking was that if we could have a shared experience, we could come back to the …
Uncovering the”Theme” of Reading Instruction in Schools
Within a week of starting this school year, junior high students spent about four days taking a reading test (MAP, Measures of Academic Progress) on our new Chromebooks. It took four days, in part, because we had wi-fi problems causing the computer-based test to stall or …
Anthologies: Limitations in Higher Education
by Elaine Magin Ethical ELA resonates with my own experiences as a teacher who often feels limited by what I’m able to teach in the classroom. Even though this blog is not focused on teaching English language arts in higher education, I am overwhelmed by …
Illinois Reading Council: Inclusive Literature Reading Workshop
Below are links to assignments I created for the inclusive literature workshop to promote conversation about and across books for reading conferences, book groups, blogs, movies, and speeches. In every case, I tried to use these assignments as ways of entering or continuing a conversation …
Look into My Eyes: 3 Lessons from Week 1 of 1:1 Chromebooks
At the end of the 2015-16 school year, I wrote a proposal to be considered for a Chromebook pilot in our junior high. In 2017-18, our school district would be a 1:1 school, but this school year (2016-17), the district was looking for teachers who …
Text Me What You’re Reading This Weekend
How are you encouraging students and their families to make time for weekend reading? Now that we are back to school, my #bookaday is not getting much action. With more to do, I have to be more deliberate about making time to read, and I …
#bookaday: My Summer’s Top 20 (Plus 100 More)
From living in a 1930s Kentucky mining town in Empty Spaces to being the last man on earth in Y:The Last Man, from being an orphan on the streets in Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London to being an orphan in a haunted house in The Night Gardener, from being the outcast robot among forest creatures in The Wild Robot to being the outsider on a roller derby team in Roller Girl, from the escapades of a trio of teen boys in Ms. Bixby’s Last Day to a trio of teen girls in Raymie Nightingale — only with books could I have spent time with such an interesting group of people (#bookaday).
Listening to Students
“Listening means creating an audience for children. And one of the best ways to pull children forward into literacy is to become an active, interested audience in their reading lives” (59, No More Reading for Junk).
Review of Nobody Nowhere The Extraordinary Autobiography of An Autistic by Donna Williams
As a teacher, I found myself stopping and wondering: Do I often only hear babbling where there is, in fact, poetry? How do my assumptions and expectations for student writing and communication block a student’s ability to communicate? Do my expectations work against my intentions?
Classroom Library Systems: Apps, Cards, Sheets, & None of the Above (Survey Results, Part 2)
In Taking Care of Your Classroom Library Books, I shared results from a summer survey of teachers on how they manage their classroom libraries and advice from my local library focusing on book care. In this follow-up post, I will share more results from the …