teaching resources

Creative Writing ► April 18, 2021

Teaching Creative Writing: Tips for Your High School Class

When I was first told that I’d be teaching creative writing, I panicked. While I had always enjoyed writing myself, I had no idea how to show others how to do it creatively. After all, all of my professional development had focused on argumentative writing and improving test scores. Eventually, though, I came to love my creative writing class, and I think you will too. In this post, I hope to help you with shaping your own creative writing class.

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Literature ► October 18, 2020

5 Easy Tips for Teaching Horror Stories

So, you’re teaching horror stories, but you don’t want to do the same, boring unit that everyone else does? You want your students to be engaged, creative, but to also learn the foundational purpose and practices of the horror genre. In this blog post, I’ll cover 5 tips for teaching horror stories so that your unit will stand out!

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Life Tips for Teachers ► May 31, 2020

How to Lesson Plan for the Unexpected

Whether you’re teaching during a pandemic, a pregnancy, or with a sick loved one, sometimes we teachers have to enter into a school year, semester, or week without knowing that we’ll actually be there to see our lessons through. In this post, I hope to provide some tips for how to lesson plan for unexpected events or for when the future is uncertain.

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Writing ► March 8, 2020

6 Ways You Should Be Scaffolding Student Writing

You’ve probably heard a million times that you should be using differentiated instruction in your classroom. If you’re in a stricter building, it may even be required that you document your differentiation strategies. But how, exactly, are we supposed to differentiate writing instruction for our advanced, gifted, special education, trauma-sensitive, and ELL learners in a single class period!? It seems impossible! At least it does until you consider scaffolding writing instruction.

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Writing ► December 15, 2019

Claim, Evidence, Reasoning: What You Need to Know

Have you been told that you need to start using a claim, evidence, and reasoning (or C-E-R) framework for writing in your classroom? Maybe you need to closely adhere to the Common Core State Standards but aren’t quite sure where to begin. If you’re like me, you may have been told by administration-on-high that the whole school would be using C-E-R language in their classes to build consistency and teacher equity for students. Regardless, here you are wondering, what the heck is claim, evidence, and reasoning anyway? In this post, I aim to break it down for you.

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