Teen Literacy Tips

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. I’d also love to hear what you have to say, so please feel free to comment on any post. Thanks for visiting!Two issues that students care deeply about are freedom and money.  They want to be independent and they want [...]

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This year I’m using a project-based approach to teach my eighth grade English class.  The students are in the process of planning a multimedia site consisting of a blog, an audio podcast and a video podcast.  Here’s of rough outline of how they’re doing it:

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Is the world a dark, depressing slide into chaos or a beautiful, bright ascent into joy?  The following music videos provide an audiovisual starting point for students to discuss angst and optimism.  After showing the videos, invite students to comment on these two approaches to life, and to grapple with their own life philosophy.

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The Value of Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing is one of the most important skills we can teach junior high and high school students. Often they want to rush into interpreting and reacting to a text even before they know what it means. We teachers sometimes suffer from the delusion that since a student can read the [...]

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Chaleygirl, a 41-year veteran of teaching who is starting a new position asks:
Can you steer me towards any good ways of teaching speech? I want my students to have my opportunities to speak in class, but I don’t want to bore them with gobs of notes on pronunciation, articulation, correct breathing techniques, etc. I want [...]

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