A list of sites I’ve been giving my students to practice writing online. I’ll keep it updated as best I can.
 

Larry Ferlazzo has an exhaustive (of course) list of places for students to write and share online. Some of the blogging sites look good and I’d add Livejournal to the mix because of the social aspects. It’s really easy to make a friend’s list of friends’ blogs. And Bookemon looks awesome as well!
Larry’s collection of places to write for authentic audiences is also really good. Or just encourage them to go on forums …Continue

So the schedule for our programs is such that we sometimes end up having a class day after students have taken all of their final exams. As you might imagine, the dear dedicated students that normally populate my enchanted kingdom of learning and love are replaced by bored clock-watchers. Understandable, but regrettable. And if I just let them watch a movie, I kinda feel like I’m not really doing my job. I blame Robin Williams for my overdeveloped sense of responsibility toward my students, but it’s too late to change …Continue

Hadn’t expected to find time to do another 30 Goals post so soon after the first one, but I had a great class today that led me to come right home and blog about a highly inspiring group of students I had once.
This was a group of students I had had before and found a bit rowdy but intelligent and serious. I was teaching them in an essay writing class. We had been talking about thesis statements the class before and I was planning to quickly review it and then …Continue

This is less of a proper activity and more just sharing a Process Essay Graphic Organizer that I made. These three were made for specific readings that students were to reverse outline, but they can easily be adapted to other readings. Or just used by students to write their own essays. They aren’t anything particularly fancy but they illustrate three different ways to put together a Process Essay.

One of the units at school requires students to write a process essay, or a how-to essay. I found the concept was hard for the students, so I produced a lot of material to help them.
Earlier I put up one

Another type of essay I have to subject my students to is the process/solution essay. One of the things that drove me nuts when reading their first drafts was that they didn’t seem to really care about the problems they were writing about. They didn’t seem to really have any idea why this thing was bad. So I’d get essays like, “Smoking is a big problem. I will tell you three ways to quit smoking.” I hardly blame the students. No one had ever really taught them how to write …Continue

My students have to do a process (or “How to do something”) essay. I was looking for a way to tie it into Halloween. While looking for costume ideas, I found these instructions on how to make a mask and thought they’d be perfect as an example of a how-to essay, once they were simplified a bit and made more universal. I don’t think everyone wants to go as SlipKnot!
So here’s my version of “How to make a mask”[DOCX]. I also presented it to them by cutting up each paragraph …Continue

This was a fun little thing I wrote up yesterday for a lesson on how to write a formal letter. I always like to give examples of not only the good but also the bad and sometimes the downright ugly. So if you’re looking for a pre-made bad letter to teach students the rules of writing good letters in English, here’s a what not to do model.
I gave it to my students and asked them to find the mistakes, which are:

Writer’s address should be on the right
“Hey guys”  is not …Continue

I’m continuing on from from my post the other day on teaching how to write an opposing argument-rebuttal essay, and my failures to do so well. As I described my students simply failed to get this form at all, so I’ve been going back through the material and putting together how I would have liked to have taught it the first time. Having established why we need this, I would give them this skeleton outline [DOCX] (which I finally made up after the second class just on the form of …Continue

I have had one of the toughest weeks with my students. There’s nothing worse than trying to teach students something that they simply don’t get. You try explaining it different ways, you try giving them examples, but no matter what you have them do, one student throws his hands up in the middle of an exercise and says, “I just don’t get it” and half the class starts nodding their heads. This is when you wonder if you have any clue how to teach at all. And this is what …Continue

This reverse reading activity by Mike Harrison looks really interesting. The idea is that you have students write questions for an imaginary reading. Then they generate the reading to match the questions.
Seems like it would target a lot of skills at once, not only language skills like grammar, writing, and discussion but also teamwork, creativity, and collaboration.
I also love it as a way of teaching pre-writing. I know a lot of authors come up with an idea for a story, or maybe a first scene. Then they ask themselves questions, …Continue