6 Reasons To Teach With Mentor Texts

Starting a writing unit by examining great examples of the kinds of writing we’ll be doing is one of those ideas that I seem to forget and remember over and over again. Maybe it’s because I rush through writing plans, anxious to get to the assignment so that students can start working. Maybe it’s the effort of looking for good examples. Perhaps it’s the mistake of believing that my explanation is plenty and students shouldn’t need anything more. Or possibly

4 Units to Achieve Back-To-School Goals

As a teacher, you might have just a few goals for the beginning of the school year: set the tone for your classroom; inspire students to work harder; establish rigor and expectations; teach students to think independently. Oh, and don’t forget win over students by showing them how much fun they’ll be having this year, and, when you teach high school, getting to know over 100 new people as fast as possible. Seems simple, right? Every year, I have tried

A List of Poems For Every Unit

One resource that I have always wanted as a teacher is a list of poems arranged by theme so I could easily find a great piece to add to any unit. Well, here’s that list. If you see a link in the title to the poem, that’s because I sell a resource for teaching that poem. (Think about it as a great choice if it’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday night and you’d rather go to bed than sit up

Why Do Teachers Look For Writing Prompts? (And What They Should Be Looking For Instead)

In doing a little keyword research for my Teachers Pay Teachers products and the guest blog posts that I write in hopes that people will find and buy those products, I have found that an often searched for term is “writing prompts.” I continue to be almost shocked that people just look for writing prompts, without any tie to content or units of study or texts. I don’t think, though, that they are simply looking for someone to give them

How To Teach Poetry

How To Teach Poetry April is National Poetry Month, and while I could happily spend hours analyzing a poem with a group of seventeen-year-olds, I know that not everyone feels that way. Poetry is not always an easy sell. Students might not have much experience with poetry, or they don’t like it, or they think that it’s going to be too hard. But by the end of my introductory unit, I have won (almost) all of them over. They look

Argument Essay Unit: Cellphone Pros and Cons

I have to admit that I resisted teaching a research based argument essay in my ELA classes for over twelve years. Each year, I would “forget” or “not get to it” or “sort of do an assignment that fulfills the requirement.” The requirement, as I understood it, was for students to click around on the internet for a few hours, put some facts together in a new format, and then say where they had gotten that information. It seemed like

How To Teach Writing: My Top Ten List

I’ve recently created a resource that combines all of my writing lesson plans—prompts, creative assignments, units on persuasive essays and personal essays and some just weird fun stuff that I think is pretty innovative. So I have been thinking a little about my philosophies on teaching writing. I remember early on in my career as a teacher, when I realized that I was doing fine with the literature and books, but that I was really lagging behind with the writing

Common Core: 3 Tips For Teaching Challenging Non-Fiction

Common Core: 3 Tips for Teaching With Challenging Non-Fiction

Whether I’m assigning an article about the relationship between a fixed mindset and the Enron scandal or I’m requiring students to read an essay about how basketball, race, and dreams are all intertwined, I have a few common goals when I choose challenging non-fiction to incorporate in my lesson plans. I want students to learn how to deal with difficult vocabulary, how to navigate complex sentence structure sentence structure, and most importantly, I want them to learn how to question

Common Core: Challenging Non-Fiction Texts For All Subject Areas

I admit to feeling resentful when I learned that the new Common Core standards would require teachers to incorporate more challenging non-fiction into their lesson plans. Really? Wasn’t I doing more than enough already? But I have since (reluctantly and grudgingly) found some great articles to use in class. In fact, one of my favorite new lessons revolves around a piece published in the New Yorker about the relationship between the Enron Scandal and fixed mindset. Since I decided to

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