Group items tagged

"The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story. But as a writer, how do you suck your readers into your stories in this way? Nalo Hopkinson shares some tips for how to use language to make your fiction really come alive."

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"We need to do something unobvious in our reading choices: we must choose complete fiction and non-fiction texts that can be easily read and grasped literally by all students, so that summarizing is easy; yet, be texts in which the main ideas are not obvious. Otherwise, there is little use for true comprehension, specific strategies, or distinctions between ideas and information."

A simple idea for incorporating non-fiction - it is all around us.

reading non-fiction as inquiry - plug in author for scientists in the chart to add an inquiry angle to the text.

A list of 20+ non-fiction writers under 40. There is a bio for each with a brief discussion of his or her work.

Tips for teaching and studying non-fiction. Genre study

Short non-fiction pieces

"To help kids separate fact from fiction, Newsela partnered with the American Press Institute in October of 2016. Now whenever kids read an article on their electronic device, in addition to their normal comprehension questions, they're prompted to ask questions about the article itself: Where do the facts come from? Is there a bias? What's missing from this piece? "That'll be like a mini-research project for the student," Coogan says. Teachers can ask kids probing questions about the outlet, including where it's headquartered, where it receives funding, and what affiliations its members might have. No one would go to such great lengths reading the morning paper, Coogan says, but it's meant to be overkill in order to instill healthy levels of skepticism. "It's a good exercise to always question the source of the information," she says."

""Writing is rewriting," says everyone all the time. But what they don't say, necessarily, is how. Yesterday, Tor pointed me in the direction of this old blog post from Patrick Rothfuss-whose Kingkiller Chronicle is soon to be adapted for film and television by Lin-Manuel Miranda, in case you hadn't heard-in which he describes, step-by-step, his revision process over a single night. Out of many, one assumes. It's illuminating, and I wound up digging around on the Internet for more personal stories of editing strategies, investigating the revision processes of a number of celebrated contemporary writers of fantasy, realism, and young adult fiction. So in the interest of stealing from those who have succeeded, read on."

Atticus Finch is one of the greatest fictional dads of all time, and in honor of the film's half-century mark, both his daughters spoke to CNN. That is, Peck's real life daughter, Cecilia Peck, and the actress who played Scout, Mary Badham. By all accounts, Peck, who won the Academy Award for his portrayal of Atticus, embodied his character's values on and off screen. "He was an Atticus," Cecilia Peck said. "He really was that kind of father to me and my brothers. I believe that he was always very much like Atticus but I think that doing the film when we were very young made him become even more that way and I think as much as he put of himself into the role, Atticus became him, too."

"Through independent reading children gain a wealth of background knowledge about many different things, come to understand story and non-fiction structures, absorb the essentials of English grammar, and continuously expand their vocabularies. "

"The national myth of happiness pursued and won has always been contested in fiction - and its promise seems almost extinct in some contemporary novels"

"A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning. That's one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down - or, in this case, lay down - to turn out a piece of fiction."

This site offers thousands of books through the ages on-line. You can take pieces of all fiction and non-fiction and use them in your classes in various ways.

At present, the Syllabus Explorer is mostly a tool for counting how often texts are assigned over the past decade. There is something for everyone here. The traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato's "Republic" at No. 2, "The Communist Manifesto" at No. 3, and "Frankenstein" at No. 5, followed by Aristotle's "Ethics," Hobbes's "Leviathan," Machiavelli's "The Prince," "Oedipus" and "Hamlet." Writing guides are also well represented, with "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White at No. 1, as are major textbooks, led by Neil Campbell's "Biology" at No. 4. What about fiction from the past 50 years? Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ranks first, at No. 43, followed by William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Art Spiegelman's "Maus," Ms. Morrison's "The Bluest Eye," Sandra Cisneros's "The House on Mango Street," Anne Moody's "Coming of Age in Mississippi," Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony" and Alice Walker's "The Color Purple." Top articles? Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History." "

""They're all great readers," she said, noting that nearly 90 percent are reading at grade level. "But I have a hard time getting them to engage with the text, read for understanding and deeper meaning. I have a hard time getting them to read and think and write critically about fiction and nonfiction alike.""

"There's an eerie symmetry between Donald Trump and The Great Gatsby's Tom Buchanan, as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century. It's not just their infamous carelessness, the smashing-up of things and creatures that propels Tom's denouement and has seemed to many a Twitter user to be the animating force behind Trump's policy and personnel decisions. The two men, real and fictional, mirror each other in superficial but telling ways."

" five articles that use photography and narrative to reveal the texture of teenage life; next, 11 articles about young people making a splash in the world; and, finally, three news articles about teenage life that we think might provoke interesting classroom discussions. Let us know what you think and how we could make this feature more useful for your classroom. The next installment will be published on July 11."