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…