More Fun at the P20 Educator Conference 2017

This afternoon I get to present Choose Your Own Adventure: Writing and Publishing Narratives Using Digital Technology at the P20 Educator Conference in Twin Falls. It's always fun to hear other teachers share strategies for teaching writing while we learn to hyperlink and create alternate-path stories. Narrative writing is such an adventure!

Want the slideshow? It's yours! Go to https://goo.gl/c49wS5.

For more encouragement today, one of my favorite conference-related posts is Avoid Burnout and Get the Most Out of an Education Conference. At the P20 conference, I don't expect to feel burnt out. It's only two days, and the sessions have been awesome! Hope you get as much out of your conference as I already have! Share in the comments some of your take-aways. I'd love to hear them!

Using Mentor Texts to Teach Writing and Enhance Creativity

"Mentor text" is a buzz-word in education circles, but what does it mean? How can teachers use mentor texts effectively in the classroom to teach reading and writing?

Free PD Presentation on Using Mentor Texts

I recently had the opportunity to explore the topic of mentor texts and create a professional development presentation for my Idaho Coaching Network class. The result is "Using Mentor Texts to Enhance Creativity," and it's free to you from Christian Teacher, Public School for educational or PD use.

This presentation focuses on teaching writing using mentor texts such as "Four Eyes" by Nikki Grimes, "April Rain Song" by Langston Hughes, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson, and "The Rainy Day" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The grade-level examples are approximately third-sixth, though the principles for using mentor texts extend lower and higher.

It's twenty-four below here in southern Idaho, and the snow is reaching record depths, but my mind turned toward spring when creating this Google Slides presentation. Hence the rainy-day, umbrellas-and-rubber boots theme. I hope you enjoy!

Know of a great strategy or resource to use with mentor texts? Have a favorite mentor text that you use in your classroom? Share in the comments!

More teacher resources:
Free Ninth Grade Vocabulary Presentation with Lots of Images to Help Kids Learn Words
Visit Brevity on Teachers Pay Teachers
Freebies from Dover Publishing

New Ideas for Alternate-Ending Story Activities

Had a wonderful time today with my fellow Idaho Core Coach Network teachers and guests at our spring conference. My presentation on Choose Your Own Adventure narratives drew a small but enthusiastic group. They suggested strategies and applications I hadn't thought of (turns out Google Slides works pretty well for linking to new pages; a rubric would be helpful) and dove into the writing part with zest. Thanks for a fun session!

Choose Your Own Adventure: Writing and Publishing Narratives Using Digital Technology

Test driving my presentation on Choose Your Own Adventure: Writing and Publishing Narratives Using Digital Technology May 4 at the Idaho Core Coach Network regional meeting/spring conference in Twin Falls. You can access the handout here. Hoping to bring the session to a larger audience in October. In the meantime, visit my post on using Choose Your Own Adventure theory in the classroom here.

Learning Through Writing: Choose Your Own Adventure

When I was a kid, I loved to read books from the Choose Your Own Adventure series. On each page was a choice, something like this. "If you decide to risk the mountain lions and explore the cave, turn to page 23. If you decide to look for a stream to replenish your water supply, turn to page 71." If you were killed by mountain lions on page twenty-three, you could always go back and see where the other choice led. In fact, you often died. No problem. Just go back to page one, or wherever you left a bookmark last.

Similarly, video games often include a story with many choices for the player to make. The decisions you make alter the course of the game. When your character dies, you play again.

I like to assign a choose-your-own story to my high school students. It's digital, with hyperlinks to different documents in a Google Drive folder for the pages. The first page sets up the scenario ("You are Sir Lancelot. The castle at Camelot is under attack") and the viewpoint character. Second person present works best for the point of view. At the bottom of the page is the first set of choices. Instead of using "turn to page 5," use "click here" or "click to page 5." Then, link to the new page. Be sure to put the page number at the top of each page, and save each document as the same number. Keep the story to twelve pages or so for beginners, and keep a running list of how each page turns out if you are concerned about the ratio of positive outcomes to negative outcomes.

There are several Web sites students can use to help them write choose-your-own stories, but I like the challenge of creating my own story, format and links. The students are up for the challenge, too.

What should they write about? This assignment works well for fiction or nonfiction. My daughter wrote one in which the reader is a trout. It required her to research the life cycle of a trout and what the trout's natural predators are. I'm researching Antoine Lavoisier, a chemist who was guillotined during the French Revolution. Turning Lavoisier's life into a choose-your-own story has been challenging, since I am working to understand the science part and then to make the concepts easy for my students or other young readers to understand.

To get a better feel for how it all works, see if your library has the classic Choose Your Own Adventure books, or pick up similar versions by R.L. Stein or other authors. Then, create your own story to share with your students. They'll be raring to write!

Turnitin's Free, Virtual Conference on Writing Education

"Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book!" Job 19:23

Writing is a skill that isn't going away just because the world is changing. I'm excited to tune in to Turnitin's virtual writing/tech conference, The Writing Mindset, next week. Sessions from previous years are posted on the site, including "The Future of Writing: I Wandered Lonely In The Cloud" by Anya Kamenetz, Lead Education Blogger at NPR, a session I listened to avidly this evening. What's coming at this year's conference? "How Writers Read," "Teaching the Writing Brain," "Mimicry and Plagiarism," and "What's the Story Behind Why We Write?" to name a few tempting-looking morsels.

These webcasts would make a great discussion starter for English departments, as well as a resource for new teachers and homeschool parents who aren't sure how to approach teaching writing. Just fill out a simple form and click to view.

Step Away From the Thesaurus

If you teach writing, pop over to the Wall Street Journal for a read. James R. Hagerty's recent article "'Use More Expressive Words!' Teachers Bark, Beseech, Implore" explores the trend of teachers banning boring words and even giving them a mock funeral. The trend has been around for a while and shows no signs of dying.

As a writing student and now as a writing teacher, I am glad the downside of using fancy synonyms is finally getting some attention. James R. Hagerty's article is even-handed, but it brings to light some detriments of forbidding the use of simple words like "said." Detriments you won't see by scrolling Pinterest, where well-meaning teachers celebrate the use of vibrant synonyms to the complete exclusion of certain everyday words.

Among a serious writer's many challenges is preventing the reader from lurching to a halt and waking up from the "vivid and continuous dream," as John Gardner famously puts it. You want your reader enjoying your writing, not thinking, "Ooo, another ten-dollar word!" every other line.

People think using "said" too often is repetitive and therefore boring. In reality, the word "said" becomes invisible. It's like "the" or "and." It's a necessary building block of many sentences, though not the shiniest or most exciting of blocks.

If you want to change things up when writing dialogue, you don't have to resort to the thesaurus. You can often leave out the dialogue tags altogether:

Sherman's hour in detention was up. "See you tomorrow, Mrs. Phillips."
"See you tomorrow."

Far on the other end of the spectrum are the kind of said-synonyms found on lengthy lists pinned so eagerly on Pinterest: growled, implied, rasped, whispered, squealed.

There's a reason Hemingway, Dickens, and other greats "get a pass" on their use of "said" and other simple words. It's not because they're Hemingway and Dickens and we're not. It's because they're good writers, and because simple words used well are valuable in their own right.

Mark Twain said, "Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."

Although the Bible doesn't comment specifically on the word "said," it does use it often (some 4002 times in the KJV). Proverbs 25:11 says, "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." The emphasis seems to be on how appropriate and timely the words are, not how unusual.

There's beauty in simplicity. Less is more.