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Posts from the ‘PAWLP’ Category

Apr 19

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Celebrate with Poetry! Plus a Treasure Chest of Poetry Books

by Lynne R. Dorfman

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. 
~W.H. Auden

It is sometimes hard to define something, even when we feel we know it fairly well. Emily Dickinson, once confided in a letter, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”   We might offer these ideas: Poetry is a story, the painting of a scene, a thought, a small moment in time. The trouble is that most dictionary definitions of poetry are dry, limiting, and vague; and so we are left scratching our heads.  What, then, is this magical writing that has such power and range, capable of ever-renewing our spirits? Read more

Apr 6

7 Comments

Teacher-to-Teacher: Poetry as Noticing

By Janice Ewing

Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Mary Oliver (from “Sometimes”)

These are among my favorite lines from Mary Oliver, and I think that these “instructions” apply to poetry, too.  Once again we find ourselves in April, Poetry Month. Many of us have considered the value of giving poetry its special twelfth of the year, versus reading, writing and enjoying it all the time. This year, I’m feeling a little more mellow about that issue. I’ve come to believe that we can immerse ourselves and our students in poetry through all seasons, and still take the month of April to celebrate it with fun and fanfare. Read more

Mar 23

5 Comments

From the Classroom: Organization is an Act of Revision

By Brian Kelley

CaptureI’ve always admired my father’s garage. It is organized. Utility shelves on the left. Steel pegboards and hooks on the rear and right walls. Every tool has its place. He knows where everything is, yet he is constantly revising the content of the garage.

My mother keeps adding stuff to the house, and older stuff is belched out to my father into the garage. So, my father makes decisions. He replaces and rearranges. He adds what he must. And he deletes. I know for a fact that he would love to delete a lot more.

When I teach organization to middle school writers, the lessons of my father’s garage must be in the DNA of my methods. Everything has its place. Nothing starts organized, and this includes writing.

Organization is an act of revision.  Read more

Mar 9

5 Comments

Guest Post: Why Teach the 6-traits of Effective Writing?

by Dr. Jolene Borgese

We need only go to the source to find why we need to teach the traits—Vicki Spandel. Vicki, while working at the Northwest Laboratory, worked with 17 teachers at Beaverton, Oregon School District, using the research of Paul Dietrich, who created an analytical writing assessment rubric. Through their work with Vicki, they also identified six characteristics true of all good writing (ideas. organization, word choice, voice, sentence fluency and conventions).  Vicki capsulizes the reasons for teaching and using the six traits:

  1. Builds students understanding of concepts like voice
  2. Provides language for thinking and talking about writing
  3. Gives students options for revising
  4. Teaches students to think – by making them evaluators
  5. Connects reading and writing through mentor texts
  6. Puts students in charge of their own writing process  (Creating Writers, 2013 page 3). 

Read more

Feb 24

4 Comments

Assessment Opportunities: Asking Authentic Questions to Inform Instruction (Guest Post)

By Clare Landrigan and Tammy Mulligan

We are always on the lookout for assessment opportunities that can happen authentically, right in the midst of our teaching.  Asking a pre-assessment question before a whole class, small group or individual lesson is one assessment opportunity that we have found invaluable and it only takes a minute or two.  We simply begin by asking a question, have students turn and talk, and move among the partnerships to listen and take notes.  Once students have had time to talk, we tell the class a few ideas we heard and connect these ideas to the lesson we are about to teach.  Read more

Feb 17

13 Comments

From the Classroom: Finding “Moments Worth Writing About”

by Tricia Ebarvia

It’s just after 7:20 a.m. and my students are settling into their seats. Although it’s early, this class is usually lively, with students generally willing to try out whatever their English teacher has planned for them that day. This morning, I pass out cream-colored quarter sheets of paper and several tape dispensers. I go over the lesson plan to the sound of pages flipping, synchronized to the squeaky pulling and staccatoed tearing of tape. Into their notebook, students tape the following Willa Cather quotation:

“Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

Today is Day 1 in a brief unit on the personal history essay. I decided to call this next essay a personal history rather than the more familiar term memoir for a few reasons. One, the term memoir feels a little intimidating to me; the term has always implied a confessional quality to it, like a great secret is about to be shared, a great burden lifted. For better or worse, memoirs feel too big a task, too much to ask.

So instead, I like the term personal history. Read more

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