Over the past few years I’ve come to believe more and more strongly in the power of the sentence as a tool for developing proficiency in reading and writing. The fundamental problem, for students who don’t write or read as well as they could, is often that they aren’t good enough at creating sentences that capture…
Well, soccer fans and coaching geeks, it’s time for the latest installment of Desert Island Drills, in which I ask a coach to describe the one drill they’d take with them to a desert island–assuming, I suppose, that they also had a team there that they were trying to prepare for long-term success. Previous posts here and here. This…
Spent an hour or so in front of the fire with one of my daughters this morning, reading aloud from Black Beauty, the all-time horsiest children’s book, written by Anna Sewell and published in 1877. We’ve been working our way through it together for a week or so now and It’s been a great experience… My daughter…
Spent the morning watching English classes at the Albany Academy (and the Albany Academy for Girls) with my old friend Alisa Scapatici, who appears to go now by “Scap”… at least to the kids. Subject for another blog but I always wanted to have a cool one syllable teacher nickname like that. Incredibly useful to see what the…
I posted this morning about the power of building a Culture of Error in the classroom. The idea is that if students try to hide their errors from you, you have to work twice as hard to find them, but if they WANT you to see them… if you tacitly agree that uncovering error and fixing…