Blogs on English Language Arts

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.

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.

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.

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.