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6-Traits Resources Digital Magazine: Follow Us and Help Spread the Word?
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Creative writing is hard. Like, really, really hard. While I can bang out an academic paper in no time at all, I find myself agonizing over the keyboard for hours just to churn out a couple measly pages. Oftentimes, I find that the hardest part of creative writing is just starting the story.
Articles and excerpts based on Reflect and Write: 270 Poems and Photographs to Inspire Writing by Elizabeth Guy and Hank Kellner.
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
Luci Tapahonso is the author of several collections of poetry, including A Radiant Curve andBlue Horses Rush In.
Eight tips to make your dialogue writing successful.
Larry Feriazzo: Here’s a interesting infographic from Kaplan on “How To Teach English.” The bonus is that, along with the infographic, they published this comment from my co-author and colleague, Katie Hull Sypnieski:
Katie Hull Sypnieski, co-author of The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels, said: In our ESL classes my teaching partner, Larry Ferlazzo, and I use international celebrities to increase engagement with our students. We also use celebrities in our lessons on developing successful life skills. In these lessons, we focus on the non-cognitive traits of celebrities such as self-control, taking personal responsibility, and having grit.
Today’s writing prompts are inspired by poetry but that doesn’t mean they have to inspire a poem. Use them to write anything you want; a short story, a blog post, a journal entry, or a freewrite. You might even try writing a song, keeping in mind that song lyrics are a type of poetry in their own right.
Retired NNWP Consultant and friend of WritingFix, Joe Elcano, loves to tell the story of his son writing an strongly-opinionated essay about Barry Bonds taking the national home run record. The teacher required Joe's son to share his essay in class with his writing response group; the three members of the group gave a little feedback, but not as much as the writer was hoping for. At home, Joe encouraged his son to polish up the essay once more time, and then post it on a national sports blog for feedback. Within twenty-four hours, the essay received hundreds of responses. Some comments were--of course--unintelligent disagreements, but Joe had prepared his son that this would probably happen. Many of the responses were thoughtful and helpful, even from readers who disagreed with Joe's son's opinions. As Joe explains, "This was the most authentic writing task my son had ever experienced. Did he take writing the essay more seriously when he decided to publish it where thousands would see it? You bet he did."
Mesa Public Schools uses the 6+1 Writing Traits Model to guide the instruction and evaluation of writing. Mesa Public Schools has selected a 6-point rubric to use for assessing writing in accordance with the 6+1 Writing Traits Model. MPS rubrics are available in a student-friendly format with simplified langauge and alternative terms for use in with students in the classroom.
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Amy Krouse Rosenthal provides insight into her new word play book. Chronicle Books offers a giveaway of the book to one reader who comments on this post.
Today Deb Gaby and I finished leading the third day of a three-day Foundations of Writing Workshop training. At the end, we asked for reflections.
Learn to teach and assess writing with the 6-Traits of writing
(voice, ideas, word choice, organization, sentence fluency and conventions). Learn to use the 6-Traits with the writing process to teach revision strategies. Help learners meet higher standards and improve test scores.
Bryan Hutchinson: I love quotes about writing.
Below each quote is the name and blog link to the blogger who provided the quote. Special thanks to everyone who provided a quote. I added click-to-tweet to most quotes, but some were too long to be tweetable.
Slick Write is a free tool that checks your writing for potential stylistic mistakes and other features of interest. Whether you're a blogger, novelist, or student writing an essay for school, Slick Write can help take your writing to the next level. Curious? Try a quick demo, or enter your own text in the editor tab. After submitting, four more tabs will appear at the top of the screen: - Critique - This tab contains the body of text with stylistic features highlighted.
- Structure - Here you will find the sentences color coded by type and length.
- Flow - Hold your readers' interest by maintaining good flow.
- Stats - This is where you will find important statistics on a variety of subjects including readability, word frequencies, and repeated phrases.
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Kidblog is designed for K-12 teachers who want to provide each student with an individual blog. Students publish posts and participate in academic discussions within a secure classroom blogging community. Teachers maintain complete control over student blogs and user accounts.
The Essay Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to organize and outline their ideas for an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.
Expository writing is an increasingly important skill for elementary, middle, and high school students to master. This interactive graphic organizer helps students develop an outline that includes an introductory statement, main ideas they want to discuss or describe, supporting details, and a conclusion that summarizes the main ideas. The tool offers multiple ways to navigate information including a graphic in the upper right-hand corner that allows students to move around the map without having to work in a linear fashion. The finished map can be saved, e-mailed, or printed.
In 2006, after looking over our still-growing collection of on-line lessons, we asked ourselves, "What would make these lessons even more useable to teachers?" The answer we kept coming back to was "Student samples." We set this long-term goal for ourselves: "By 2011, let's provide a range of student samples for every lesson and prompt featured at this website." WritingFix is currently in the process of finding these samples. We started by collecting samples from Nevada teachers (which is where WritingFix began), but soon we began receiving e-mailed samples from all over the U.S.A. Now the entire globe has represented. Any teacher who is thinking about submitting a student sample for possible publication should read the information provided on this page. To post any student's piece of writing, you need to be a member of our Online Student Publishing Group at our site-sponsored Ning. Join today!
Sentence Fluency is just one of the six writing traits. In Nevada, where only four traits (ideas, organization, voice, and conventions) are "officially" assessed on the fifth grade state writing test, you can elements of sentence fluency embedded on the state's conventions rubric. So, as we say in our trait trainings, even though sentence fluency doesn't have its own rubric on the state test, teaching it well can improve students' convention scores.
Sentence Fluency is a complex trait that should be discussed, explored, and further developed every year that students learn to write in school; both kindergartners and high school seniors can be taught to think about developmentally appropriate skills that are associated with sentence fluency. This page contains sentence fluency lessons and resources that we consider appropriate for sharing with third graders and up. If you are working with primary writers and the six traits, be sure to visit WritingFix's 6 Traits and Primary Writing Homepage for lessons designed specifically for those grade levels.
eFuse.com is a virtual primer for creating great web sites-offering information, inspiration, assistance and entertainment.
Via Ann Kenady
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