FANBOYS

"The canary flew out of the window. The canary was yellow."

Free online books library--Great site!

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.

Poetry Foundation Learning Lab

"How to Create a Realistic Fiction Character" Recommended by Stevi for unit 3: Realistic Fiction

"Flash Fiction: a complete story in one thousand or fewer words." One of the sites recommended by Stevi Quate for use in unit 3: Realistic Fiction

"This protocol to discuss student work was created to help grade level teams reflect on their definitions of proficient work on specified assignments or assessments and to reach consensus on what constitutes a proficient response as well as to diagnose the student performance in relation to proficiency to inform instruction. Each teacher will be asked to bring three samples of student work from the same assignment or assessment: a student response from one of the top 5 students in the class, a response from one of the middle ten students in the class and a response from one of the bottom 10 students in the class."

Short Story Interactive Unit

Model for writing a short story: good for use on the Smart Board

Great Site!

"Using Graphic Organizers Graphic organizers are excellent tools for helping students connect ideas and see relationships between different pieces of information. The goal is for students to expand their knowledge by understanding the material in their own way. Graphic organizers can be used for a variety of purposes, such as eliciting prior knowledge, demonstrating a sequence of events, and comparing and contrasting. "

"The Writing Workshop, similar to the Reading Workshop, is a method of teaching writing using a workshop method. Students are given opportunities to write in a variety of genres and helps foster a love of writing. The Writing Workshop allows teachers to meet the needs of their students by differentiating their instruction and gearing instruction based on information gathered throughout the workshop."

Once Upon a Fairy Tale: Teaching Revision as a Concept Overview Students sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between the global issues of revision and the local ones of editing. After reading several fractured fairy tales, students make a list of the ways the original stories have been revised-changed or altered, not just "corrected"-to begin building a definition of global revision. After students have written a "revised" story of their own, they revise again, focusing more on audience but still paying attention to ideas, organization, and voice. During another session, students look at editing as a way to polish writing, establishing a definition of revision as a multi-level process.