If You Liked This Book, Then Read This

For today I made a simple graphic highlight a number of 2022 books. These are all books I've read this year that I can't get enough of. For some students, sometimes that familiar book is just the next step to push them towards something fresh.

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A Gallery Walk in American Wilderness

The first week of school was met with the usual jitters and excitement. My school had its debut of a gorgeous new renovated space with more glass, nooks, and crannies than I can properly do it justice. It's a flexible space, and the opportunities seem endless. This year, I started my American Wilderness with the Imagine Our Parks with Poems project. The project "...commissioned fifty poets to write poems about a park in each of the fifty states. This project is part of Imagine Your Parks, a grant initiative from the National Endowment for the Arts created in partnership with the National Park Service to support projects that use the arts to engage people with the memorable places and landscapes of the National Park System." My idea was students could canvas a large portion of the United States, seeing various states of wilderness and the state's identity. Using these poems as mentor texts, my hope was students would utilize their Writer's Notebook starting ...

Best LGBTQ Books for Students of 2019

October is LGBTQ history month. This is the perfect opportunity to expose our students to LGBTQ texts. For me, this is essential. As a student, the closest I could find to LGBTQ characters were Tom from The Glass Menagerie , the random David Sedaris piece and Michael Thomas Ford's books (which as a teenager I was way too young to be reading about). Now, there's a number of LGBT characters and representation in literature, but if you're an educator, where do you start? What I'm hoping is that my students will see queer texts not as queer texts, but simply texts. Often times (and not to generalize, but here I go anyway) my straight male students will avoid anything with even a hint of gay subtext. The more I talk to my students, it's clear that there is still an internalized insecurity. What they read might say something about themselves. In truth, a book is a book, queer characters or not. The easiest way to break the ice with that stereotype is that I always tel...

HyperDocs: Creating Ownership Through Exploration

HyperDocs are here, and the potential for student exploration and engagement seems bountiful. But hold up— Before we delve into the potential, what is a HyperDoc? The short answer is: It's a Google Doc with a variety of links that leads to a number of different tasks. Once students receive this doc, they're free to explore it in any order and any pace of their choosing. But to sum up a HyperDoc as a Google Doc with just a bunch of links would be the equivalent of saying Moby Dick is a book about a whale. To be so reductive is to miss the point. To see a full HyperDoc Click Here Going Beyond the Workshop Model As an ELA teacher, I'm a workshop model kind of guy. Walk into my class at any given moment, and you know what you will see. The first ten minutes? Reading. The next five to ten minutes? Quick Write. Followed by mini-lessons, workshop time and sharing somewhere in-between. It's routine (and never boring). Often times, I map out my work weeks in advan...

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