Teaching about character traits is fun. Students enjoy learning new words to describe people, and the subject lends itself to lots of intere...

One of my favorite kinds of stories is the story told through letters or documents. In these stories, a reader needs to piece together the d...

Writers love feedback. One way that I've found to give students lots of feedback very quickly is to have students display their work on ...

One of the biggest challenges that I face as a writing teacher is how to structure the pace of the class. How can I keep things moving, but ...

"Mrs. Kissner, look at my poem!" Me: "Uhhh...." For a long time, I was tongue-tied when students brought me their poems....

We're making a big shift in my classroom, a shift from working with text structure to working with making inferences in fiction. I love ...

Two weeks ago, I brought in a mass of unknown eggs to the classroom. For the first few days, we thought they were salamanders. Then, they ha...