ELA (3)

ELA Activity: 10-Song Playlist

As a high school language arts teacher, I’m always trying to provide my students with alternate but equal assessments that aren’t always an essay. It’s true—you can totally assess a set of skills using claim, textual evidence, and reasoning in creative ways. This 10-song playlist project is one...

animated clouds

Word Clouds for Understanding Word Choice

Student writers—especially reluctant ones—often struggle with choosing the most fitting words to create an appropriate tone or mood in their writing. As a result, their essays end up with a lot of words like “nice” or “things” or “people.” These words are fine (another less-than-stellar word), but...

Illustration of a gold trophy. Read More.

Middle School ELA: Capitals Club

Although our middle school ELA students should have been capitalizing words like "I" since they were in early elementary school, many either just don't do it or don't take the time to proofread their work to make sure they did. 

5 different book covers

5 Books I've Slept On

We've all been there– you hear endless praise for a book and buy it, fully intending to learn what all the hype is about. But then it sits on your TBR shelf for months collecting dust.

Four students sit around a book and discuss its contents

Active Reading Notes & Purpose Statement

Whether teaching literature or rhetoric, close reading is an essential and often difficult skill to teach. This note-taking system, which is a modification of the Cornell note system, helps students slow down and examine a text closely through a structured approach that requires them to summarize...