Reading Like a Writer: Looking closely at “Speech Class”

Hear what happened when I looked closely at poems with a handful of middle grade elementary teachers and facilitated a discussion about the use of dialogue in one.

A Unit of Study in Poetry

Get a step-by-step tour of how you might teach a poetry unit. Sample mini-lessons, noticing charts, conferring videos, conferring notes and more are included. Also includes “Teacher Try-Its” to help you fill your own writer’s notebook with material that you can teach from!

Notebook strategies to help generate and revise poems

Here are five notebook strategies that can support your poetry unit. They also fit or could be adapted to other units of study. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to teach the same notebook strategy in multiple units—that demonstrates how valuable the strategy is across genres, subject matter, audiences, purposes, etc.