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!I’m not convinced that they’re all real, but if you’re looking for a good laugh (and who isn’t), then [...]

[Read more →]

The Lifehacker site has a great story about how the writing process isn’t always as neat, orderly and sequential as we teachers sometimes portray it. The story would make a great anecdote for a teacher inservice on the writing process or for a mini-lesson on silencing the inner editor:
How Neal Stephenson’s Typewriter Kept Him Writing

[Read more →]

A lipogram is a type of word play whereby an author creates a piece of writing with a missing letter.  One of the most famous lipograms is Ernest Vincent Wright’s 50,000 word story, Gadsby, which omits the letter E.
For a fun way to engage students in writing and help them with the trait of word [...]

[Read more →]

How do we help junior and senior high students ask the deep questions about life, and–more importantly–answer those questions? One way is to use the This I Believe curriculum unit from National Public Radio.

[Read more →]

Mike Miller’s Simile Generator is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. Press a button and it spits out two parts of a simile, the tenor and the vehicle. Students are left to supply the grounds of comparison. Here’s a quick review of those three parts, [...]

[Read more →]