What is the goal of your writing instruction? • Is your instruction geared to helping your students become the next great American novelist? • Is your primary goal to make sure that your students never leave a dangling participle or slit an infinitive? • Do you hope to develop a passion for writing? • Is your goal to help [...]
Should You Teach Your Students to INVENT a Good Story, or to TELL a Good Story? The truth is that there is very little difference between a personal narrative essay and a fiction story. After all, who doesn’t look at a fiction story and then look at the author and say, “Oh, I didn’t know…” [...]
The Six Traits of Writing In teaching elementary students to write well there is “grammar” and there is “writing.” Many teachers teach A LOT of grammar because when it comes to teaching writing, they are at a loss. What does it mean to teach “writing?” A useful model that can help elementary teachers [...]
More than teaching any other subject, teaching writing involves teaching with the end in mind. The teacher who does not see the outcomes they are looking for in writing instruction will spend much of the instructional time lost. This is frustrating for the teacher, and frustrating for the children learning how to write. The [...]
I was a business major in college, and an actor after college, before I became a teacher. I have always had in interest in both creativity and productivity. Nowhere in the teaching of elementary students do these two opposing sides create the greatest confusion than in the teaching of writing. It creates confusion in the [...]