Blogs on English Language Arts

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Ben JohnsonAugust 24, 2012

In Texas we have a new state test called the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness (STAAR) and some schools like mine, were surprised by the student poor performance in writing. As I was reviewing the low scores, I began thinking, "What else can I do to help my students write better?"

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Laura BradleyAugust 13, 2012

My 8th-graders do their best writing when it is part of a project that is meaningful to them and will be published in some way when they are finished. So over the years, my students have written and illustrated children's books for schools in Uganda, published magazines on topics of their choice, blogged poems from their autobiographies, and showcased their best work in online portfolios.

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Todd FinleyAugust 8, 2012

High school writers often fail to include dialogue in their stories. Perhaps this is because they over-rely on telling narratives. Or perhaps skipping dialogue is a strategy that allows students to elude the punctuation rules that accompany quotations. Regardless, students should be taught that the payoffs for learning a few dialogue-writing skills are ample: dialogue can help develop plot, reveal characters' motivation, create a visceral experience for the reader, and make average stories extraordinary.

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Kerri FlinchbaughAugust 1, 2012

At the 2012 Conference on College Composition and Communication, three well-known writing scholars led a discussion on a writing exercise they'd assigned themselves. For 30 days, each wrote for an hour about a different everyday object. After CCCC, three of us -- all friends, teachers and writers -- were energized by the idea of this activity and decided to try it out.

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Andrew MillerJuly 26, 2012

One of the critically mentioned components of the Common Core is the complex text. This need for complex text came out of studies that students were not arriving at college ready to read college-level texts independently. The Common Core documents also indicate other reasons and rationale. One of the most startling claims is: "Despite steady or growing reading demands from various sources, K–12 reading texts have actually trended downward in difficulty in the last half century." Overall, the common core believes our students are not only ill-prepared to read complex texts, but also not receiving exposure and instruction coupled with complex text.

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Jeff GrabillJuly 12, 2012

It is commonplace to bemoan the poor writing skills of students today. Yes, there is no question that writing effectively is difficult. Yes, it is true that we don't provide enough high quality writing instruction (writing is known as the "forgotten R"). And yes, the demands of a knowledge economy require excellent writing abilities. But the students we teach today write more than any generation in human history, and one reason for that is the pervasiveness of writing technologies in their lives.

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Lisa Michelle DabbsJuly 11, 2012

When I was a kid, some of the things I enjoyed most about summer were swimming and banana splits! Yes . . . you heard right. Banana splits! They were my fave summer treat for many years, and I will always remember them with great fondness. As this summer has started, I've seen my PLN (personal learning network) sharing great ideas of how to spend the time in fun and frolic! I've also seen great ideas posted about how to get the most out of our summer learning time. I share this simply to say that as we seek ways to do some summer learning, we need to do it in a way that (like my banana splits) we will remember fondly.

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Todd FinleyJune 28, 2012

Of the thousands of 18.5-year-olds that I've taught, some could not manage the challenges of college while others attacked higher education responsibilities with full uh-rah commitment. It is from observing the later group's mojo that I derived the following strategies.

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Mary Beth HertzJune 14, 2012

As we approach the summer months, many educators lament the "summer slide." The months between June and September can vary between enriching camp or other learning experiences to days upon days spent playing video games or watching TV on the couch. Students often return to school having lost a reading level or a variety of math concepts.

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Autumn CrispJune 12, 2012

Even those of us who teach Shakespeare may never take the time to appreciate the dedication that he had to craft. He's such a fixture of Western sensibility that he's easy to take for granted; we might begin to assume that writing came easily to him, but wouldn't that diminish his hard work? According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, his complete works consist of 118,406 lines of verse. A solid majority of those verses are in rigid iambic pentameter or trochaic tetrameter or some other icky meter that most of us modern poets don't touch with a ten-foot quill. I personally lean towards haiku, as do most of my students.

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