Gifted and Talented (G.A.T.E.) Students Do the MATH before they do the WRITING
I once taught a 5th grade G.A.T.E. class at a very affluent school for the final two months of the school year. It was my off-track vacation time and their teacher could not finish the year. I had never seen students like these [...]
In the inner-city of Los Angeles there are many “year round schools.” On quite a few of my vacations I have taken over classrooms that were “without a teacher.” These are classrooms where others “did not” or “would not” stay. They are challenging. They contain many, many reluctant and remedial writers.
I have experienced these “extreme [...]
Teaching Sentences as Grammar VS. Teaching Sentences as Writing
Do you teach “grammar” when you teach children about sentences… or do you teach “writing” when you teach children about sentences? Let’s take a quiz. Read this sentence:
Do you still eat pizza every day?
Which of these four kinds of sentences is this?
• Declarative Sentence – Makes a statement.
• Interrogative Sentence [...]
Grammar, Vocabulary, Worksheets… NOT!
Grammar, phonics… whatever my students need is what I want to teach. I can get as excited about the sound of a single letter as I can about an entire essay.
Discovering the full beauty and interconnectedness of a particular subject is always fascinating to me.
This beauty exists in even the most minute [...]
What is a paragraph and how do you teach children to write a paragraph?
“A paragraph is a group of sentences about one main idea or topic. A paragraph usually contains between 5-8 sentences about that one main idea or topic. All of your sentences in the paragraph must be about that one main idea or [...]
Teachers are Searching for Answers on How to Teach Writing (The middle school teachers and parents are the ones with a tone of desperation!)
Through my weblogs, I get to see what searches brought people to this website. Here are some of my favorite searches that showed up on the weblogs. If you look at them, [...]