Halloween is one of my favorite times of the school year. The excitement in the air, the costumes, the candy… and of course, the spooky stories students can’t wait to write! 👻 But here’s the problem: When I first started teaching, I would hand out a Halloween writing prompt and say, “Go write …
There’s nothing more disheartening than administering a writing diagnostic to your students and watching them struggle. Maybe their responses are only a sentence or two long. Maybe what they write barely qualifies as a sentence at all. Or perhaps they simply copy directly from the text—or repeat…
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After 30 years in the classroom, I’ve learned that teaching middle school ELA is anything but one-size-fits-all. Every year, my students come in with wildly different needs. Some need to review sentence basics. Others are ready to debate the development of a theme across chapters. And I’m sure you …
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📌 The Overwhelming Baseline Essay Every year, our school wanted all students to complete a baseline essay writing assessment . I remember sitting there, grading 120 essays, determined to create a table marking every single writing skill gap at once. As you can imagine, I was quickly overwhelmed…