A Learning Style Model Based on the Questions Your Students Want Answered There are many interesting models for analyzing students’ different learning styles. Here is a practical model which may change the way you teach writing… today. You will have a checklist of the four learning styles, as well as the four questions which these four [...]
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 split 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 how 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 is [...]
Teaching writing involves teaching with the end in mind. When writing goals and expectations are clear, students do not perceive their writing assignments as busy work. Here are THREE GREAT RESOURCES for learning how to see the end in mind in your elementary writing instruction: The first resource is Stephen R. Covey’s The Seven Habits [...]
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 more confusion than in the teaching of writing. It creates confusion for the teacher, which in [...]