Analysis of Responses to 8th Grade Text Set & Prompt, Part 2
Posted on April 27, 2015Share This Content
teaching with nonfiction
Guided writing lesson – a productive struggle
Posted on April 18, 2015I had the honor of teaching a small 2nd grade group of students a guided writing lesson after we had done a guided reading lesson with an excerpt from an A to Z text, George Washington Carver, Level O. In a previous post, I wrote about the first lesson – close reading of an excerpt …Read more
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Easier Main Ideas – Think Traits of Historical Figures
Posted on March 13, 2015I’ve been thinking about how we can help students identifying multiple main/central ideas in a text. Traditionally we’ve focused on identifying one main idea, but beginning in 5th grade (and continuing in 6th and 7th), the Common Core Standards for Reading Informational Texts expect students to be able to “determine two or more main ideas …Read more
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Is “text evidence” becoming a fill-in-the-blank?
Posted on February 18, 2015A few weeks ago I had the honor of working with a class of students who were writing an analytic essay in response to a text about Frederick Douglass. During this lesson, I’d posed a text-dependent question and we’d carefully read the article and taken notes. When we moved from taking notes to using those …Read more
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In the last blog entry, I shared a rigorous text set and prompt developed by an middle school ELA team. The team and I met (via Webinex) to discuss the students’ written responses. First we look at the strengths of each student’s analytic essay; then we discuss the students’ needs as writers. Integrated into this …Read more