This year I’m celebrating National Poetry Month with “30 Days of Poetry” on the Super ELA! Instagram and TikTok accounts. Follow along with me as I discuss thirty different approaches and ideas to help jazz up your poetry lessons. (And I promise that not one of them is TPCASTT!) See the list below for links … Read more
Valentine’s Day is upon us, which means that classrooms are about to be bombarded with candygrams, PDA is going to skyrocket, and hallway assignations will clog the flow of traffic between bells even more than they already do. Instead of leaning away from love in the classroom, I say lean toward it, and there’s no … Read more
Last fall, I took a class on American Lit from 1776-1865. While the majority of our time was spent on prose produced in a young and conflicted United States, toward the end we shifted our focus to poetry, and this led us to the subject of today’s post: Emily Dickinson. I had not read much … Read more
Like many ELA teachers, I like to use music as an inroad for teaching figures of speech. It’s not only accessible for struggling readers, but also delightful for me because I get to watch a room of too-cool-for-school teens rock out to my tunes. For today’s post, I’d like to share my favorite lesson plan … Read more
It was a chilly Thursday morning when I pulled into the wooded parking lot of NewGate School in Lakewood Ranch. I felt like Mary Lennox as I entered the campus, like I was entering a mysterious and secret garden of education. (This is how I’ve always thought about Montessori schools.) My “key” to this garden … Read more