As the Save the Words website expresses it:

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie unused, unloved and unwanted.

Today 90% of everything we write is communicated by only 7,000 words.

You can change all that. Help save the words!

When you adopt a word, you make a solemn vow: “I hereby promise to use this word, in conversation and correspondence, as frequently as possible to very best of my ability.”

This would be a clever and fun way to get students playing with words. After they adopt a word students could use it in a poem, in their daily work, or in class discussions.

How would you use this site in your classroom?

Courage?

Yes, courage.  I am a control freak and an introvert, two qualities which seem diametrically opposed to running a writing workshop.  Managing twenty-one students as they work independently on various digital creations gives me a lot of anxiety.  However, I am determined to give students the same chance to develop as writers as I give them as readers.  Just as I allow students the freedom to choose their own books to read, I will allow students to find their own topics, genres and  voices in which to write. Incorporating technology on a daily basis will enhance students’ abilities to become content creators for the 21st century.

These are the professional resources I have at my disposal for planning and implementing the digital writing workshop:

• Troy Hicks’ book The Digital Writing Workshop – I was in the middle of planning the workshop when I heard about this book, so I ordered it immediately; it should be here in a few days.
• The Digital Writing Workshop Ning Group
• My Twitter personal learning network – please feel free to join and share your experiences with me
• The educational blogs I follow via Google Reader (see the list in the right sidebar)
• And my favorite books on writing workshops in general:
  • In the Middle by Nancie Atwell
  • Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide by Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi
  • How’s It Going by Carl Anderson
  • Assessing Writers by Carl Anderson

The students will have access to the following technology:

• Each student will be working on a 13″ Macbook with iWork and iLife.
• The class has one digital camera and one digital video camera.
• I have a Zoom H2 portable digital recorder that students can use if they need it.
• Students also have access to blogs, wikis and the school YouTube account.

Wish me luck, and please share your thoughts, advice and resources with me.

If you’ve struggled to explain to students why Wikipedia is not a reliable source, Mark Moran at FindingDulcinea has written The Top 10 Reasons Students Cannot Cite or Rely on Wikipedia.  Among his points:

• You can’t rely on something when you don’t know who wrote it.
• Sometimes vandals create malicious entries that go uncorrected for months.
• There is little diversity among editors.

I wish I would have had Moran’s article about four weeks ago when my eighth graders were deep into the research portion of their I-Search projects. I will certainly be using it next year.

The list is a must-read for anyone teaching research skills at the junior high or high school level.  And don’t miss FindingDulcinea’s guide to Wikipedia in the Classroom.

• “She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.”
• “The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.”
• “Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.”

See the complete list at Help.com.

How Neal Stephenson’s Typewriter Kept Him Writing

For a fun way to engage students in writing and help them with the trait of word choice, challenge them to write their own lipgrams.  When they’re done they can exchange the lipograms and try to guess the missing letter.

Another interesting exercise in word choice might be to imitate Mary Godolphin’s one-syllable adaptations.  Godolphin (Lucy Aikin) wrote one-syllable versions of Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe.  Students could adapt short stories or they could make up their own.

Each week National Public Radio airs 3-minute personal essays written by ordinary people and occasionally by more famous personalities. The essays express the authors’ deeply held beliefs, and their reasons for believing. As the website states, “This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives.”

Recent essays have included the following statements of belief:

• “I believe that each and every human being on this planet is tied to every other human being on this planet in one way or another.”
• “I believe that we as individuals, nations, and as groups of any size in between are ultimately capable of compassion and care for those with whom we do not identify.”
• “I believe in giving blood.”
• “I believe that the best kind of grief for the dead is gratitude.”

This I Believe, Inc. encourages everyone to contribute to the project, and provides teachers with a curriculum for helping students write their own 300-500 word essays. The essays can be submitted directly to the This I Believe website, and essays that are selected to be recorded for radio earn the author $200.

My own students are currently in the middle of writing their own essays. We began the unit last week by looking at the difference between personal narratives and personal essays. I played a few This I Believe recordings and contrasted them with a personal narrative included in the curriculum unit.

The students were then given various belief statements to agree or disagree with, and they had to tell a personal story about why they held that belief. This week students will write their essays, and next week we will submit them to This I Believe and record them for our Called 2 B Saints podcast.

The students are discovering that it’s pretty easy to name a belief, but what’s not so easy is explaining why they have a particular belief. One of the challenges of teaching a unit like this is to keep it from evolving into a persuasive paper where every student tries to convince the class that their belief is right and everyone else is wrong. That’s not really the purpose of the project.

The goal project “is not to persuade Americans to agree on the same beliefs. Rather, they hope to encourage people to begin the much more difficult task of developing respect for beliefs different from their own.”

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s a challenge to help teenagers retain their own values and beliefs in the face of so many differing statements.  Too often, teenagers think they have to abandon their personal beliefs in order to get along with others.  Or, out of a well-intentioned desire to be accepting and tolerant, teens will often say that everyone is right, regardless of the fact that beliefs contradict each other.

The This I Believe unit can help students clarify their own beliefs while at the same time learn to respect the beliefs of others.  If you choose to teach a unit like this, it’s a good idea to be ready to talk about how to “agree to disagree,” something that more adults could learn to do.

But the teacher’s main job in a curriculum like this is mostly to get out of the way so students can write.

I’ll let you know when the students have finished writing their essays so you can read them and listen to them on Called2BSaints.com.

The Three Parts of a Simile (or Metaphor)

Every simile has three parts: a tenor, vehicle and grounds. Let’s use the following simile as our example: Sheila moved like a panther.

• The tenor of the simile is what the writer is trying to clarify or make more understandable. In our example, the tenor is Sheila.
• The vehicle is the concrete object that is being compared to the tenor. Sheila is like a panther.
• The grounds of a simile refers to the qualities of the vehicle that the reader is meant to apply to the tenor. For example, the writer is most likely trying to say that Sheila moved with power and stealth, not that she has whiskers and four feet (although she may be prowling on all fours–we would have to see more context).

Two More Examples

James was like a bull in a china shop.

• Tenor: James
• Vehicle: a bull in a china shop
• Grounds: big and clumsy

The students on the playground were like a herd of cattle.

• Tenor: the students on the playground
• Vehicle: a herd of cattle
• Grounds: in groups that move together; herded by a teacher

Similes and Metaphors in the Classroom

It’s crucial that students understand how similes and metaphors work from the perspective of both reading and writing. Writing similes (while avoiding cliches) requires high level thinking, and giving students practice creating them will improve their overall communication skills.

Mike Miller’s Simile Generator produces a relationship between a random abstract noun and a random concrete noun and challenges the reader to create a connection between them. Here are some similes it produced for me:

• Integrity is like a dagger.
• Bitterness is like a flea.
• Loyalty is like a candle.
• Optimism is like a towel.

The students must supply the grounds. How is bitterness like a flea? This is a terrific question, because first students must have a solid understanding of “bitterness,” and then they need to use their imaginations to connect it to a flea. They might come up with something like this: “Bitterness is like a flea; it’s a constant irritation and it distracts you from what’s really important.”

Other students may make other connections, which gives you an opportunity to talk about interpreting literature or the importance of personal experience in making meaning from a text. My experience of fleas may be different from yours, so the way I connect them to bitterness may be different from the way you connect them.

You can use the generator in your classroom in several ways. You can generate 5-10 similes yourself and then type them up for students to work with, or you can instruct students to visit the site themselves and to generate a few to solve on their own.

Try this in your classroom. It’s like eating a box of chocolates–you never know what you’re going to get.

I came across a website the other day called Gramlee, which charges money to proofread documents.  They’ll proofread anything, for about 5 cents a word.  You can send them an email, a research paper, whatever, and their proofreaders will correct it and get it back to you.  Gottabewrite is another similar service.

You can use these websites to talk to your students about independence and money.  If students learn how to write well, they should have no need to pay anyone to proofread their writing.  In fact, if they learn to write well enough, they can get people to pay them to proofread.  Writing well puts them in the driver’s seat, rather than being stuck in the back getting car sick.

Paying people to proofread your papers is like paying someone cook your food: it’s a luxury most people can’t afford.  And even if you can afford it, you still have to depend on someone else.  What if the cook gets sick?  What if he or she poisons the pot roast?

No, thank you, I’d rather do it myself.

As their “About” page explains,

Whether you are an attorney, manager, student or blogger, writing skills are essential for your success. Considering the rise of the information age, they are even more important, as people are surrounded by e-mails, wikis, social networks and so on.

It can be difficult to hone one’s writing skills within this fast paced environment. To solve this problem we decided to create Daily Writing Tips, a blog where you will find simple yet effective tips to improve your writing.

The articles are brief and practical, and organized in convenient categories, including the following:

• Business Writing
• Fiction Writing
• Freelance Writing
  
• General
• Grammar
• Misused Words
• Punctuation
• Spelling
• Writing Basics

Daily Writing Tips is a gold mine for teachers.  Here’s just a small sample of some great posts that can help you in your teaching:

• Learning from Poetry
• Ready, Set, Write!
• 10 Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals
• Audience is Everything
• Concise Writing: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

Check out more great articles at Daily Writing Tips.