Excitedly, I am back in the classroom in September! Over the past few weeks, I’ve started thinking about new ways to engage my next cohort of students. As I’ve been thinking, a friend reached out to share that her son has been enjoying podcasts and that got me thinking about how they might be useful […]
Literacy
Effective Assessment and Feedback: The Single Point Rubric
I’ve never really been focused on grades in my classroom. Some educators and parents might find it shocking to read a teacher put that in print. However, what I mean is that I seldom talk to my students about levels and letter grades. I focus discussion around feedback, improvement, exemplars and success criteria. When rubrics were […]
Non Fiction vs. Fiction?
The majority of what I read and write daily is non fiction. If I were to attach a statistic to it, I would hazard to say that 95% of what I read and write on a daily basis is non fiction. I like to write poetry and narratives too but I seldom have the time […]
The Almighty Meme
My teenage son is obsessed with memes. I remember my friends and I at his age, randomly quoting lines from John Hughes or Monty Python movies which confounded the adults around us but my friends and I would collapse into hysterics. I am now the confounded adult but instead of movies, the quotes are from internet […]
Digital Literacy Day!
Let’s face it. The world is changing at a rapid rate and technology is evolving so quickly that some of us have a hard time keeping up. Do you know who is ready to embrace new tech and move rapidly with these changes? Our students! Thursday, May 31st, 2018 is Digital Literacy Day in Toronto. […]
Book Clubs and Talks
Over the past month or so, we’ve been on a mission to really identify what we enjoy reading and how we can gain greater meaning or understanding from texts. From character analysis and making connections between events in texts to our lives; to searching for themes that speak to greater societal realities, we’ve been looking […]
The Virtues of Non Fiction Reading and Writing – Part 2
Our Journey We began by identifying the books in our book bags as fiction or nonfiction. The students justified how they knew if a book was fiction or nonfiction. In small groups the students compiled lists of nonfiction text features that they noticed in their stack of chosen books. As a class we went through the […]