The Curious Teacher

I think I can safely say that gone are the days when students wrote book reports as a response to reading activity and prove what they have read. Thankfully, the teaching profession has evolved and realized that if we are to  prepare students for real-world writing, they need to be immersed in more qualitative tasks. There are just so many fun, interactive, and meaningful alternatives to the  old-fashioned book report, that to be hard-headed and continue to assign book reports just does not make sense. This is why I have created this post; I want to share some authentic post-reading assessments as alternatives to the book report. Anyone can write a book report without having actually read a book. But to be able to engage in deeper and more authentic learning, students need to prove that they possess the analytical and inferential skills necessary to truly understand a book. Instead of being able to describe  the who, what, and where of a book, it is much more impo...

Just recently I discovered a tech tool that I can't wait to use in my Language Arts classroom next school year: this Automatic Newspaper Generator  from the Homemade Gifts Made Easy website. This tool has so many uses in the Language Arts classroom; here's just a few: Summarize a chapter or book  Write a newspaper article (using the 5 W's: Who-What-Where-When-Why) telling about a crucial event in a book Write an article about a special holiday Etc. Students practice numerous skills when  writing a newspaper article, such as: writing effective headlines; summarizing; writing with focus; main idea, etc. This is  definitely a tool I will use in my classroom next year and will write a new post on how it went. Meanwhile, you can check out a sample article I generated here using the tool here . I based it off The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton, which is has always been very popular among my middle school students.

I am a member of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and subscribe to their Voices from the Middle middle school level publication. It gives me tons of innovative ideas for my classroom and helps keep me up-to-date on best practices in the world of  middle school Language Arts. Just recently, one of their articles  gave me the idea of implementing the Six-Word Memoir into my classroom. You can get the ReadWriteThink lesson plan the article referenced here . According to legend, Ernest Hemingway started the six-word memoir after he was challenged to write a six-word novel. He came up with, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Inspired by Hemingway,  SMITH magazine launched their six-word memoirs online in 2006 and challenged readers to submit their very own six-word memoirs through contests. (The goal is for students to utilize their words carefully and powerfully because they only have six words to express or describe their life story, current state ...

A few months ago I assisted a Booktopia event in my middle school's auditorium with one of my classes. The author began his introduction by asking, "Do you know an adult that says he  or she will publish a book but never does anything about it?" Incredibly, my entire class "put me on the spot" as they say, and pointed to me. Although everyone in the auditorium laughed at this gesture, this was an "Aha!" moment for me. I had not realized that I had shared my dream of writing with my students and that I had not lived up to one of my goals.  After this moment, I decided not to be that adult that talks  about dreams they will never accomplish; therefore, I decided to start slowly by publishing this blog. Although blog writing is not technically book publishing, at least it is a baby step towards one day becoming a published author. I thank my middle school students' innocence and brutal honesty for unknowingly giving me this much needed wake up call....