Last week, I reviewed several word cloud generators and suggested a few ways that you can use word clouds in the classroom. This week, I am sharing some ways that you can use word clouds in your classes to engage…
Category: Literature
Updating Your Word Cloud Tools
Word clouds can give writers helpful information as they revise their work. As I explained in my previous post Word Clouds as Revision Tools, “Word clouds highlight the most frequently used words in a text, using larger font sizes for…
24 Free Audiobooks to Download This Summer
If you like audiobooks, check out the free young adult audiobook downloads from Sync YA Audiobooks. It’s 24 books–two each week starting on May 30. I’ve downloaded these books the past two summers, and they are excellent books each year.…
30 Poems You Can Write for National Poetry Month
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…
Bits Week in Review for November 28
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…
Bits Week in Review for November 6
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.…
Award-Winning Sentences
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…
Reading, Writing, Eating
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…
Write a Poem a Day for National Poetry Month
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…
Thanksgiving Classroom Discussion: The Meaning of 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…