Writing Education Articles for Teachers

I was introducing the dialectical journal to my class when one of my students raised his hand and asked, “What is a dialectical journal exactly? I mean, what does dialectical even mean?” I opened my mouth, ready to respond, and nothing came out. I knew my purpose in using a dialectica...

Teaching the basics of composition is one thing, but the step where learners understand voice and sentence variety can be a little harder. These more abstract concepts are particularly difficult to explain to ELD students with limited vocabularies. I’ve found that integrating music into my ...

What is Found Poetry? Released earlier this month, “On World Poetry Day, We’re All Poets” describes what is called a discovery poem. As it turns out, it is also known as a found poem. Found poetry has become a very popular poetic form in the classroom. Often likened ...

When I was little, there was nothing I loved more that writing a short story. Short stories are fun, and they engage the imagination in a unique way. Writing a short story is an attainable challenge for young writers. It provides an opportunity for students to find their voice, and it may reveal ...

In my seventh and eighth grade language arts classes, I diagrammed sentences until my sentence maps ran off the page and my hand cramped. Although tedious, those exercises showed me how the pieces of a sentence fit together. It created order out of the chaos of jumbled nouns, verbs, pronouns, mod...

Kids of all ages enjoy celebrating the season with themed material, so give your pre-teen community a clip of the song “Hot Chocolate” from the 2004 film to enhance their writing style. With this mini-lesson, they will focus on using descriptive details to enliven their writing and de...

Each year, I have my GATE fifth grade class write a collaborative novel. Every student in the class is responsible for writing one chapter. The completed novel is illustrated by the class, prepared for publication by me, professionally published, sold to the public, and placed in local schools an...

Just a few short weeks into a new school year and you might already be in search of a new teaching method or getting up to speed with the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Lucky for you, there are countless seminars, conferences, and professional development opportunities waiting for you th...

How many minutes per week do you allot for writing? If you are like most teachers, it's not enough. Time remains the biggest obstacle in producing better writers. In order for someone to write well, he must do a lot of it. Ray Bradbury said, “Quantity produces quality. If you only writ...

Even though Walt Whitman’s poetry was an outgrowth of the 1800s, the themes and ideas in his works can still speak to high school students today. Whitman wrote about his hometown of Manhattan, war, and life’s many challenges. Through his poetry, you can explore issues that are meaningful to peopl...

Listen to any author interview and eventually he or she will give the advice to “write what you care about.” It makes sense that having a passion for a topic enables us to write about it more vividly. The hard part is convincing kids that anything can become a great story. The Problem with Promp...

Writing biographies offers students the chance to synthesize multiple writing lessons into one project. It's also an effective way to practice the core skills they need to become good researchers and communicators. To model the biography writing process, I recommend two new books about well-known...

In many classrooms today, teachers focus on grammatical rules and prescribed outlines for expository text, ignoring the many benefits of creative writing. Because of this emphasis on conformity, students might be stymied when asked to produce creative writing, their ability to think outside the b...

There are many significant days, weeks and months throughout the year that you can use in your classroom to create an awareness and understanding of various cultural groups, historical events, and important issues. For example, in  November your students could learn about American Indian Her...

Teaching positions don't always start at the beginning of the year, but there are ways to make any situation work. When I started teaching in a third grade class in the middle of the school year, I found that students had already built community and the classroom systems were already in place. Co...