A blank page is intimidating.  Don’t believe me?  Take a piece of paper and write three paragraphs about what you did last weekend.  I don’t know about you but I’m lucky if I remember what I ate for breakfast.  Yet, we often give students a prompt like this and then bemoan the fact that students …

These days anything worth doing is worth doing younger and first graders are sometimes asked to write paragraphs. Perhaps you have seen the hamburger model of writing (picture on left)?  Let me be clear, I love this model and have used it sometimes to assist in revising writing that is entirely unfocused.  However, this is …

All elementary school teachers are teachers of writing and yet many of them are not writers themselves.  I started my career as a writer and so this week I’ll be posting a few tips on how to teach writing in a way that resembles the real world. Tip #1 Not everything that you start writing …

I was sitting in a grade level meeting recently and realized that I was surrounded by other former filmmakers and actors.  (This might sound unusual but remember I teach in Los Angeles). Our goal was getting students to include sensory details in their writing and here are several ideas that might help you. 1.  Have …