Over the Bar Instruction

I loved Show & Tell when I was little... not so much for what I took to show my classmates, but I loved seeing the wonderful treasures they shared with me. They made playing with the latest baby doll or train set look like the pinnacle of life. I ended up wanting every toy I saw. They were very convincing. Most children have experienced Show & Tell, so this common practice in school offers a memory device to train young writers and teach them how to show their readers the id

I rarely leave my driveway without knowing my destination. In fact, I often have it on my GPS to make sure I find the most efficient route. If I didn't, I would waste time and money roaming all over town using gas I could have saved. In some cases, I may never find my destination at all. Imagine being invited to a new acquaintance's house and telling her, "No thanks, I don't need your address. I'll just wing it and eventually get there." Of course that's silly, but we often d

"The grass is green." My beginning writers often make the mistake of stating a fact instead of staking a claim, and inexperienced writing instructors often let them get by with it. In the process, both the writer and instructor end up frustrated and don't know how to get themselves out of the cycle of ineffective writing. Writing must have a purpose, and that purpose is to support and prove claims through evidence. This probably seems obvious, but to the beginning writer, and

As a middle school writing teacher, I see a lot of rickety word choice. Students will choose a big word because they naturally think that’s more impressive, or they overuse boring words because they lack the vocabulary for anything better. Often they word sentences awkwardly and obscure meaning in the confusion of unraveling their wayward syntax. Parents and teachers alike look at such writing samples and see an insurmountable task ahead. How do we teach a student to see awkw

"Exchange your papers!" Every student cringes at this thought. Some other kid, probably the smart one, will sift through my paper and pick out every missing or extra comma or pronoun reference issue and will generally make me feel about two inches tall. "I'm an idiot." "I don't measure up." "Everyone is smarter than me." If my students have this self-talk after peer review, I need to make sweeping changes. Too many classroom teachers throw out the proverbial baby with the bat