Formative Assessment for Writing Skills Hate it when students don’t read your feedback on the final paper–or even the draft?! Formative assessment for writing skills can bring peace to your world. Are rubrics formative or summative? They can be either, so it’s all about use. Because a rubric breaks down multiple skills in one chart,…
Discussion Sentence Frames Discussion sentence frames risk making your students sound like AI. With the right discussion sentence frames, they can practice skills through language. Let’s look at how to get all you possibly can out of your sentence frames. Group Discussion Evaluation The ELA Common Core discussion standard (SL 1) contains a lot of…
Literacy Assessment Literacy assessment can get overwhelming fast. How do you assess what you need to assess? Where’s that sweet spot between authentic work and easy to grade? Literacy Performance Assessment My favorite literacy performance assessments are portfolios and discussions. They help me see students’s depth of knowledge, but they are also real. Use portfolios…
Literacy for All How do we create an inclusive world with literacy for all? 54% of U.S. adults read at or below the sixth grade level. These adults (and you know them) can experience anxiety, confusion, and embarrassment with adult-level reading tasks. They can miss opportunities for advancement. They can become easy targets for those…
Tips for Argumentative Writing Argumentative writing is one of the most difficult kinds of writing to teach. Students get stuck with the content, the writing, or both. Here are 6 tips for argumentative writing to keep everyone unstuck. Separate content from writing. Make sure students understand and gather most of their evidence and ideas before…
Why Goal-Setting Is Important For Students Most teachers have a general sense of why goal-setting is important for students, but the truth goes far beyond “it’s good to have a goal.” Learn about students’s greatest passions and dreams. The goals students have shared with me are so far beyond anything I would’ve predicted for them.…
Narrative Structure How would Gustav Freytag, a 19th century playwright, feel about the proliferation of triangles modeled after his narrative structure analysis of the five-act play? I don’t know, but there are a lot of products for it on TpT. Ah, the legacy of Freytag! The theory itself, that narrative structure consists of 5 parts…
Teaching Text Structure I haven’t always focused on teaching text structure as a reading comprehension and writing skill, but now I will never not teach it. Teaching text structure allows me to teach writing skills and then transfer them directly to reading texts to see how published authors use the skills we are learning while…
Organization as a teacher Our prep time may be limited and interrupted, but you can achieve organization as a teacher. I have not always been that teacher, so how did I do it? At the start of 2025, I developed a new routine for my prep times and waited to see if it would fail…
Grading Period It can be overwhelming to reset for a new grading period, especially if you want to produce high-level reading and writing results. Focus your energy on these 4 tasks. They will make planning and lesson creation a breeze as the time goes on. This can be combined with my back-to-school set-up checklist for…
