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!The Dangerous Book for Boys may cause a bruise or too, but Guys Write for Guys Read is a [...]

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Nancie Atwell’s book The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers is a manifesto for change in reading classrooms. She successfully argues that the key to reading instruction is to arrange our teaching so that students can engage in “frequent, voluminous, self-selected reading.” To help teachers develop classroom [...]

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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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Wow! I looked at the download statistics for my Scribd documents and was amazed to see that 292 people viewed my unfinished Dead Poets Society Teaching Unit this month. I wonder how many people would view it if it were actually finished. Here’s a roundup of my top 5 documents, sorted by total number of [...]

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How can literature teachers make reading come alive for boys? Why are boys lagging behind girls in their reading skills? I just finished reading a book that answers those questions and deserves to belong on the bookshelf of every teacher of adolescents.

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