Coming up on Thursday is our annual grammar instruction workshop. We’re passionate grammar advocates at Ticking Mind because we believe it’s the backbone of explicit writing instruction which in turn makes all the difference to student achievement in writing. Of course, one of the things we’ll be talking a lot about on Thursday is teaching…
Later this week we’re running our annual spelling workshop. One of the strategies we’ll be looking at is the age old advice of ‘sounding out’ a word to help spell it. While this is solid advice, the helpfulness of it goes a lot further if we provide and model for students some more explicit steps…
Often, in the classroom, we ask students to read longer texts in order to teach comprehension and inference. But for many students, this can be an arduous task that seems to have no bearing upon their ‘real life’. Visit any cafe, website or blog, and you are likely to find motivational quotes that range from…
One of the things we spend a lot of time doing at Ticking Mind is educating teachers on how they can move past TEEL (topic sentence, evidence, example and link) or any other simile paragraph-acronym-recipes (such as PEE, PEEL, TREE, etc…). TEEL and all of its like-minded acronym friends are a handy tool for initially…
Advising students to use the five senses to improve creative writing is an old strategy. But how can we more explicitly teach students to produce something like this: From a distance the tree appeared like an old, stooped man, stumbling through the woods to scare the children. Up closer, it was something much different and…
Next week we’ll be running our workshop on the VCE EAL (English as an Additional Language) task. While listening to and comprehending spoken texts is not typically a major part of mainstream English classrooms around the country, there are some things we’ll be sharing at the workshop that all teachers can use with their students.…