How can you say you know a word if you have never spoken it aloud? How can you "own" a word if you have never used it? These are some of the questions that Heidi Hayes Jacobs prompts us to consider in her widely acclaimed book for educators Active Literacy Across the Curriculum.  Continue reading...

Several times throughout this school year, I've filled readers in on what's been going on in my Beginning Playwriting classroom, an 11th grade level class I introduced this year at my school. You can read about those updates here and here. At the end of March, we finished up the test run of this class with a final production, and I thought you'd like to read a bit about that experience as well as my final (for now) thoughts about why Playwriting belongs in the classroom. Call this my 11 o'clock number!  Continue reading...

Words are like chameleons. Just like a chameleon changes color to adapt to its environment, a word sometimes has to change forms to adapt to its context in a sentence. This might seem like a silly analogy, but if you have ever tried to teach students new words and how to use those words in original sentences, this silly analogy might benefit you (and your students).  Continue reading...

I don't naturally love short stories, even though I do like small things: fairies, marshmallows and babies all come to mind. But in my personal reading, I prefer the meatiness of a long book, be it fiction or non-. Even in my magazine reading (and I am a devoted magazine reader), I catch myself flipping ahead to see how long an article is before I start. To my mind, the longer the better, which is why I am inordinately fond of Malcolm Gladwell's articles in The New Yorker.  Continue reading...

For Black History Month, take a look at some of the speeches that have inspired progress towards racial equality in America. Beyond looking at the historical context of each speech, students can use VocabGrabber to analyze the linguistic patterns in a particular speech to gain insight into what rhetorical devices made those spoken words so memorable.  Continue reading...

Last month, I held forth on the art of getting your students — or, for that matter, yourself! — to write more. By now, you no doubt have sheaves of scrawl-covered loose-leaf sitting about. So, what's next? Editing and revising.  Continue reading...