Group items tagged

"The Story Map interactive includes a set of graphic organizers designed to assist teachers and students in prewriting and postreading activities. The organizers are intended to focus on the key elements of character, setting, conflict, and resolution development. Students can develop multiple characters, for example, in preparation for writing their own fiction, or they may reflect on and further develop characters from stories they have read. After completing individual sections or the entire organizer, students have the ability to print out their final versions for feedback and assessment. The versatility of this tool allows it to be used in multiple contexts."

Film clip to use w/teaching setting

Film Studies Unit

Camera Shots A camera shot is the amount of space that is seen in one shot or frame. Camera shots are used to demonstrate different aspects of a film's setting, characters and themes. As a result, camera shots are very important in shaping meaning in a film. Reviewing the examples on the right hand side of this page should make the different camera shots clearer.

Adolescent literacy has, for many years, been a forgotten area as educators have focused their attention on early literacy, in particular, Grades K-3. However, in the last few years adolescent literacy has gained more attention as policy makers and educators realize that literacy is a critical issue even as students transition into the middle and high school settings.

When you set out to persuade someone, you want them to accept your opinion on an issue: you want to change that person's mind to your way of thinking. To do this, you will - just as with 'writing to argue' - be presenting a written argument; but when you are trying to persuade, your argument will need to be more one-sided than the balanced presentation of views typically required in a "Writing to Argue" essay question. This is because persuasion is based on a personal conviction that your way of thinking is the right way.

Introducing Poems This is a set of strategies to help students of all ages get to know and appreciate individual poems. As well as assisting students to make meaning from poems, the strategies help to develop an understanding of style. They also offer support for students' own poetry writing. Many of the strategies originally appeared in Approaches to Poetry, published by The Department of Education and TATE.

"A Word About Reading Workshop Reading workshop gives students the opportunity to read a wider range of material than might be found in a basal reading series and to respond to the material in a many ways (Atwell, 1989). Teachers have used this rather broadly defined model to create various experiences for their students. Generally, a considerable block of time is set aside each day for reading workshop. During that time students typically engage in the following activities: * reading and responding to literature * having group minilessons on skills and strategies * participating in individual conferences with the teacher to review progress, receive individual instruction, and make plans for future activities * sharing reading responses with the group "

Classroom Strategies Explicit strategy instruction is at the core of good comprehension instruction. "Before" strategies activate students' prior knowledge and set a purpose for reading. "During" strategies help students make connections, monitor their understanding, generate questions, and stay focused. "After" strategies provide students an opportunity to summarize, question, reflect, discuss, and respond to text. Teachers should help students to understand why a strategy is useful, how it is used, and when it is appropriate. Teacher demonstration and modeling are critical factors for success, and student discussion following strategy instruction is also helpful. The most frequently researched strategies can be applied across content areas; other content-area specific strategies are emerging, and we will include them here in the future.

This site has tons of PDFs to download and use in your instructional setting. Graphic organizers and exemplars/mentor texts are just a few resources on offer.

"Poem Generator This makes random poems. First, it randomly selects sentence patterns. Then, wherever the pattern has a number, it randomly selects a word from one of the numbered word lists. You can either choose one of the sample sets of words and sentence patterns, or you can enter your own words and sentence patterns."

Poetry Unit

Using term "critical" in relation to critical essay does not imply that you will have to attack a certain work. One can create a critical essay that wholeheartedly agrees with assigned literature. The word "critical" describes your attitude when you examine the reviewed work. Such mind-set may be termed as "uninvolved analysis," which implies that you consider the coherence of the literature, the completeness of its desribed events, and so forth, before you accept or refuse it.

Interactive Fiction Tutorial

Lois Lowry tells about how she created her well-known book