Five Kinds of Nonfiction Books, Teaching Strategy 1
Update June 24, 2024: My thinking about nonfiction classification has evolved since I wrote this post, but I’ve decided not to delete it because there’s value in looking back at my past ideas. For my current thinking, please see the book 5 Kinds of Nonfiction as well as information on my website. Back in December, I published this […]
Tackling the Personal Narrative, Part 2
On Wednesday, I wrote about some of the reasons students struggle to write personal narratives and provided ideas that might help them. You can scroll down to read that post. Today I’ll be discussing a resource that really helps young writers—mentor texts. You can save student work from year to year and share good examples […]
In the Classroom: What a Great Idea!
Don’t you just love this photo? Last spring, Fran Wilson (@mrswilsons2nd), a second grade teacher in Ohio, and her teaching partner Nicole Prater shared eight of my books with their students. The books had a range of text structures and features. After the class discussed the content of a book, Fran and Nicole asked the […]
Persuasive Writing Text Set
We all know the value of mentor texts, so when Jenny Lussier, the fabulous library media specialist at Brewster School in Durham, CT, tweeted this: I took her request seriously. Back in November 2014, I wrote this post about persuasive books. It describes how surprised I was when an article in Book Links included my […]
Behind the Books: Author Purpose vs. Writing Styles
This year, I’m taking a close look at what I call the Nonfiction Triumvirate—nonfiction categories, writing styles, and text structures. For the last month or so, I’ve been focusing on Nonfiction Categories. If you missed the discussion, you can scroll down or use the search box to see past posts. Today, I was planning to […]
Behind the Books: Wise Words from a Writing Teacher
When Cathy Mere, a first grade teacher I really respect from Ohio, posted this on twitter: I decided to pop over to the Two Writing Teachers blog to take a peek. Wow, was I blown away by the post. I immediately tweeted Deb Frazier, the teacher who had written the post. (Like Cathy, Deb […]
Behind the Books: The Creative Core
Candace Fleming, author of Amelia Lost, and many other great books calls it the “vital idea.” I’ve heard other nonfiction writers use terms like inciting incident, emotional trigger, creative spark, moment of inception, central mantra. I like to call it the creative core. What is it? It’s the heart of a great nonfiction manuscript. It’s […]