Looking to engage learners at the intersection of art, literacy, and human connection?On the Outside/On the Inside is a creative activity that fosters personal reflection, while simultaneously building background in vocabulary and concepts for talking about character traits.
Watching the live reporting of the attempted coup on January 6th, 2021, I was thinking about two things: racial inequities in policing, and bias in the word choice used to report collective actions. This blog focuses on word choice, and how we can teach students to listen and read critically for bias.
Literacy educator discovers her creative writing on a standardized test, and struggles to answer the comprehension questions.
Evacuated from my home the first morning of the Tubbs Fire, I found a charred page of the bible amidst the fallen ash. Here’s an erasure poem I wrote using that that page to express the devastation and find my way towards resilience. Share these strategies to create and teach erasure poems.
I cannot change history, but in this moment I have a choice:
Do I open my eyes to clearly see?
Or bequeath the blindness bequeathed to me?
Only two weeks into my poetry recitation challenge in a Title I school, I cannot walk across the playground without a student stopping me to share a poem. “Be forewarned. Reciting poetry is contagious.” In an unscheduled visit to one fifth grade classroom, I arrived to see students out of their seats raising hands to be the first to recite poems. They had begged the teacher to let them take their poems home…
April is National Poetry Month, and I’m celebrating by inviting you to join my students and I in a personal challenge to memorize a new poem each week and recite it for others. To be honest, I never got excited about poetry recitation. It seemed boring. I’d rather create poetry than memorize it. Reciting poetry seemed like an “old-school” activity for antique pedagogy and desks in rows. But in the simple…
