Mar 31
tengrrlLiterature, poetry, ReadWriteThink acrostic, diamante, found poem, free verse, haiku, headline poem, parallel poem, parody, sonnet, two-voice poetry
April is National Poetry Month, sponsored by Academy of American Poets and other poetry organizations. Last year, we posted thirty poetry activities, one for each day of the month of April—and the good news is that we’ve got an updated poem-a-day activity for you this year too!
Each day has a link to a different kind of poetry writing, either a specific poetic form, like sonnets or acrostics, or poetry focused on a particular topic, like seasonal haiku or color poems. The materials range in grade levels, but can usually be adapted for any age (even college students).
So here’s the challenge for you and students: I found a different poem for every day of the month. How many different poems can you write? And remember that even if you don’t have time in class to write a poem each day, these poetry activities will work any day of the year!
Cross-posted to the NCTE Community ReadWriteThink.org Group and the Reading and Language Arts Group on the Thinkfinity Community.
[Photo: Magnetic Fridge Poetry by Minimalist Photography, on Flickr]
Nov 28
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature
Catch up on your reading with this round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits.
A Few Extra Links
For regular updates from Bedford Bits, be sure to sign up for the Ink’d In newsletter (and other resources), like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Nov 21
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature, research
Catch up on your reading with this round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits.
A Few Extra Links
For regular updates from Bedford Bits, be sure to sign up for the Ink’d In newsletter (and other resources), like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Cross-posted as a Note on Bedford/St. Martin’s page on Facebook.
Nov 06
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature
Here’s the round-up of posts from last week on teaching composition and rhetoric from Bedford Bits, on teaching English language arts at the secondary level in High School Bits, and on teaching literature and creative writing from Bedford Lit Bits. I hope you find something you can use in the classroom or your research!
A Few Extra Links
For regular updates from Bedford Bits, be sure to sign up for the Ink’d In newsletter (and other resources), like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
Cross-posted as a
Note on Bedford/St. Martin’s page on Facebook.
Jul 31
tengrrlBedford Bits, composition, Literature Bulwer-Lytton
One day, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton sat down and wrote what have become one of the most infamous opening lines of his novel Paul Clifford (1830): “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Bulwer-Lytton wrote other memorable lines. He penned “the pen is mightier than the sword” too, but chances are that if you know his name, it’s because of “It was a dark and stormy night.” Part of that sentence’s familiarity is thanks to Snoopy, who works so hard on that first sentence of his novels. If you’ve never quite understood the problem with that sentence, it’s likely that you’ve never read the full thing:
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
Quite the sentence, isn’t it? Since 1983, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has honored that epic sentence with a competition to write an equally spectacular sentence. This year’s winner, Sue Fondrie, teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. The Guardian has more details, including the award-winning sentence which compares memories to wind turbines and sparrows and a groaner of a winner from the Fantasy category.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for July 31. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
[Photo: Stormy night by Andrew J. Sutherland, on Flickr]
Jun 26
tengrrlBedford Bits, classroom activity, composition, Literature assignments, food writing
Alyssa Rosenberg wrote about Food in Fiction and How Cooking Brings You Closer to Characters this week in The Atlantic. The article asks readers to think about how cooking and eating the same foods as fictional characters strengthens the connection between reader and the text.
Rosenberg describes some lemon cakes she made as a connection to Sansa, a character the books by George R.R. Martin that are the basis of HBO’s Game of Throne:
The cakes weren’t anything like I’d imagined from reading about them in the book—they were spongier and less sweet, and hard to imagine as a dreamed-of delicacy. But they were delicious, a powerful visceral connection to the people on screen and the world in which they live.
Such connections between reader and text reminded me of the potential writing about food has in the composition classroom. Jay Dolmage has written two entries this year that include assignments and discussion ideas. Take a look back at Writing About Food and Food Rules for ways you can connect with students just as Rosenberg connects with those fictional characters.
This post is the introduction from the Bits Flashback for June 26. Read the rest of the post on Facebook.
[Photo: Lemon Cake by Charles Haynes, on Flickr]
Mar 31
tengrrlpoetry, ReadWriteThink poetry
April is National Poetry Month, sponsored by Academy of American Poets and other poetry organizations. ReadWriteThink includes links to poetry lesson plans, websites, and classroom activities on the calendar entry for April 1.
I wondered, however, if we had enough resources on the site to write a different kind of poetry every day. I began with student interactives and then hit the site’s search engine to come up with the list below.
Each day has a link to a different kind of poetry writing, either a specific poetic form, like sonnets or acrostics, or poetry focused on a particular topic, like seasonal haiku or color poems. The materials range in grade levels, but could usually be adapted for any age (even college students).
So here’s the challenge for you and students: I found a different poem for every day of the month. How many different poems can you write?
Cross-posted to the NCTE Community ReadWriteThink.org Group and the Reading and Language Arts Group on the Thinkfinity Community.
[Photo: Magnetic Fridge Poetry by Minimalist Photography, on Flickr]
Feb 02
tengrrlAmerican Lit, classroom activity, composition, Literature, NCTE Inbox, Photos african-american, black history, oral history, photographs, slave narratives
I gathered a list of links for Black History Month for the NCTE Inbox Blog in 2010. Lots of new resources have come online in the last year, so I’ve updated the collection with the most recent and best K12 and College resources for for African American Read-Ins and Black History Month celebrations.
As I wrote last year, click away, read, and marvel at these rich resources. There’s enough that you can visit a new site every day this month!
General Background Information
- African American History Month, from The Library of Congress
- Black History, from The History Channel
- Black History, from the National Archive
- Black History Month, from Biography.com
- Black History Month, from EDSITEment
- Black History Month, from Thinkfinity
- Culture and Change: Black History in America, from Scholastic
- The State of Black Studies: Methodology, Pedagogy and Research, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
Literature
- A Brief Chronology of African American Literature, from San Antonio College Lit Web
- African American Poets, from Famous Poets and Poems
- African American Women Writers of the 19th Century, from The Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
- African-American Women, from Duke University Library
- Black History, from Academy of American Poets
- Twenty-Eight Days Later, A Black History Month Celebration of Children’s Literature, from The Brown Bookshelf
- Black History Month, from Reading Rockets
Historical and Nonfiction Texts
- African-American Odyssey, from The Library of Congress
- African-American Quotations, from InfoPlease
- African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920, from the Library of Congress
- African American Cultural Heritage Tour, from the Smithsonian Institute
- Africana & Black History, from the New York Public Library
- American Slave Narratives: An Online Anthology, from American Studies Hypertexts at the University of Virginia
- The Church in the Southern Black Community, from Documenting the American South
- Electronic Text Center: African American, from the University of Virginia (Includes texts about African Americans as well as by African Americans)
- In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
- In Those Days: African-American Life Near the Savannah River, from the National Park Service
- North American Slave Narratives, from Documenting the American South
- Notable Speeches and Letters by African Americans, from InfoPlease
Personal Histories
- Experience War: Stories from the Veterans History Project, from the Library of Congress
- Oral Histories, from the National Visionary Leadership Project
- StoryCorps Griot, from National Museum of African American History and Culture
Photographs and Other Visual Images
- The Civil Rights Era in the U.S. News & World Report Photographs Collection, from The Library of Congress
- The Face of Slavery & Other African American Photographs, from The American Museum of Photography
- Images of African Americans from the 19th Century, from the Schomburg Center at the New York Public Library
- Jackson Davis Collection of African American Educational Photographs, from the University of Virginia Library
- Pictures of African Americans During World War II, from the National Archive
- Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination: Documentation by Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Photographers, from The Library of Congress
- Portrait of Black Chicago, from the National Archive
- Through the Lens of Time: Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection, from VCU Libraries
[Photo: Virginia Civil Rights Memorial by john.murden, on Flickr]
Dec 31
tengrrlclassroom activity, community building, List of Ten, Literature, My Writing
It’s that time of year when we take a few minutes to look back and reflect. I asked Google Analytics to do some of the work for me, and it came up with these blog entries, written in 2010, which received the most traffic during the year.
- 6 News Stories to Connect to Orwell’s 1984
Big brother really is watching you and the students you teach. These news stories (check the comments for additional links) talk about how schools and communities are using big brother tactics to track what you do.
- Top 10 Things to Do with a Banned Text
This List of Ten shares ways that students can think critically about censorship, focusing primarily on argument and persuasion.
- Text + Image = Tagxedo: The Next Generation of Word Cloud Fun
Word cloud-driven analysis (like Wordle) is ready to move to the next level with Tagxedo, which shapes your cloud of words into an image.
- List of Ten: Fun with Crayons
This collection of assignment prompts focuses on crayons, everything from color names to childhood memories.
- 38 Ways to Write about Writing
A collection of links to 38 ways that students can reflect on the writing they are doing, the strategies they use, and the different experiences they have had as writers.
- What’s the Trick to Building Community in the Classroom?
Online or off, getting students to talk to each other is a tricky task. These three lessons about building community in the business world, make a lot of sense in the classroom too.
- 6 Reasons Blogrolls Are Dying
When I tried to update a comp/rhet blogroll list, I found that blogrolls seem to be a dying breed.
- Thanksgiving Classroom Discussion: The Meaning of Thanksgiving
It turns out Mark Twain was a bit harsh about Thanksgiving, according to an excerpt from his newly-published autobiography. Turn the short passage into a classroom discussion of culture and commercialism.
- Turning Blog Posts Into a Book Draft
Thanks to NaNoWriMo and Literature & Latte’s Scrivener, I turned a variety of notes and blog posts into a very rough and informal book draft of 52,967 words!
- Literary Lists of “Ten Best”
This round-up features unusual literary lists (like 10 best tattoos or 10 best pairs of glasses in literature) from an ongoing series published in the UK newspaper The Guardian. See the comments for links to more.
So that’s 2010. I was surprised by the popularity of the Orwell post. I just happened upon several stories and threw them into the post. Lots of teachers seem to come to it however, and it was even linked in October from the New York Times Learning Blog. Who knew I’d ever get a shoutout from the New York Times? Not bad, as I look back at my personal blog writing. Not bad at all.
[Image: HP Winter Summit 2010 by negotiable_me, on Flickr]
Nov 22
tengrrlAmerican Lit, classroom activity Mark Twain, Native Americans, Thanksgiving
Still looking for that last-minute classroom activity to keep the class occupied before the Thanksgiving break? Mark Twain’s newly released autobiography includes a comment on the meaning of Thanksgiving that is bound to lead to a lively classroom discussion.
Begin the classroom discussion by asking students to brainstorm or freewrite about the meaning of Thanksgiving. To help focus their comments, you might first ask them to reflect on what Thanksgiving means to them by sharing some of their personal experiences.
Next, ask them the talk about the cultural and social messages related to the holiday. It’s likely you can arrange their shared responses into a handful of categories like family, tradition, patriotism, thankfulness, and shopping.
Once students have recorded their ideas on the meaning of Thanksgiving, turn to Twain. The New York Times published some Excerpts From the ‘Autobiography of Mark Twain’, (found via Chris Boese on Facebook) that included this vitriolic rant “On the Meaning of Thanksgiving”:
Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for — annually, not oftener — if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it.
Twain’s syntax is a little complex, so you might start by breaking down that passage and unpacking the words. Ask students to look in particular at the word choice Twain is using to establish his opinion on the meaning of Thanksgiving:
- It’s a function, rather than a holiday or celebration
- The pilgrims are “those people.”
- The function marks “exterminating their neighbors.”
There’s no whitewashing in Twain’s account of Thanksgiving! Those are some tough words, and Twain’s meaning is very clear.
Have students think about the religious and cultural references in the quotation, and challenge them to think about how Twain’s personal experiences may have influenced his opinion. Have students compare Twain’s comments to the ideas they brainstormed at the beginning of the activity, and encourage class discussion of the accuracy of Twain’s statement. Are there ways that Twain’s take on the meaning of Thanksgiving could be seen as accurate?
As an extension, ask students to adopt Twain’s structure and tone and apply it to Black Friday or Cyber Monday. What would Twain say was the meaning of those commercial events?
[Photo: Turkeys by Hey Paul, on Flickr]
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