Category: high school education

online learning

How To Win at Online Learning

Teachers! What’s your plan for next school year? Hybrid? Online Learning? Next year is still up in the air for a lot of us. And it could change a couple of times during the school year. However, it does appear that many students will spend the start of the year

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A Workshop Approach to Essay Planning

One of the biggest problems my students face with writing essays is that they don’t do enough planning before they sit in front of the computer to begin writing. Also, even though I tell them that I’m willing to look at drafts before they hand in the final copy, most

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Suspenseful Stories in Language Arts: Writing the Story

Writing suspenseful stories in the Language Arts classroom can be a fun way to teach students how stories work. In previous posts I shared model texts that I use to teach kids how suspense works.  In another post I discussed how you can teach literary devices while creating the suspenseful story. In

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suspenseful story writing

Suspenseful Story Writing in Language Arts: Model Texts

Students love to write suspenseful stories, especially around Halloween. They can be a fun diversion in a secondary Language Arts classroom which can sometimes be dominated by essays. But if done properly, they can also teach students a great deal about how stories are constructed using suspense and imagery to

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Don’t Hate! Annotate! How to REALLY Annotate a Poem

We all want students to know how to annotate and automatically do it when they are handed a piece of literature. The trouble is, for most students annotation is something they do for the teacher, and not for themselves. They don’t take any ownership of the process and don’t see

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Why Read Books?

This summer I had two wonderful experiences reading books. The first was reading War and Peace, which took me the better part of the summer, but was one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I have ever had. The second was The Importance of Being Earnest, which I read in an afternoon, laughing

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More Lessons From Yoga for Classroom Teachers

I recently did a post about what classroom teachers could learn from the way that yoga teachers run their class. Here are some more lessons that come from my experience doing a ton of yoga over the summer. (I have to give a shout out to Yoga on High, which

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