The Stenhouse Blog

In this week’s One Thing You Might Try . . . blog, art educator Paula Liz writes about how her students are using digital art projects to make their voices heard and explore ways to make change in the world.

In this week's One Thing You Might Try . . . post, K–8 literacy specialist, Gwen Blumberg, shares ideas for building anchor charts as visual scaffolds that can be easily implemented regardless of instructional setting.

"Teaching with text sets is not a luxury. It’s a possibility. It’s an approach to student-centered teaching that allows you to cover what you need to cover while engaging students in perspective taking and sense making. Because of that, it is both practical and aspirational."

In this Introduction to the forthcoming book, Text Sets in Action, the authors, Mary Ann Cappiello and Erika Thulin Dawes, tell us their "origin stories" that led them to write a book about how to successfully use text sets to carve a pathway through content area literacy. They show us how using text sets in instruction is both aspirational and practical in helping to create structures and contexts in which required learning can take place while going beyond what is merely required. They show us how this work allows for an integrated curriculum that will lead to working smarter, taking advantage of students’ interests, and customizing a curriculum that takes advantage of contemporary issues, values, and contexts. Take a look!

"There's a reason why compare and contrast is one of the top research-based strategies across any curriculum area. Think about it. Anytime you want to teach something, you want to talk about what it is and what it isn't. And that's what starts to get that conversation going." 

In this week’s One Thing You Might Try… blog, kindergarten teacher, Dawnavyn James, writes about blogging with her young students and how their self-directed use of the comments feature helped them to connect with each other’s ideas.

The following is a guest blog post from Maria Walther and Karen Biggs-Tucker, authors of the new book, The Literacy Workshop: Where Reading and Writing Converge.

When Maria and her first graders were immersed in the big idea of questioning, she read aloud the picture book, I Wonder (Holt, 2019). After enjoying this engaging book, she asked her learners, “Where do questions lead?” As you can see from her students’ responses on the chart, some smart thinking grew from this question.

In this One Thing You Might Try . . . post, kindergarten teacher, Katie Keier, offers a few ideas for maintaining the critical aspects of shared reading and writing during virtual learning and creating “Read it again!” moments for young learners—no matter what instructional setting you find yourself in.

"They already understood that reading and writing go hand in hand, we just needed to give them space and permission to try it out."

Maria Walther and Karen Biggs-Tucker are breaking tradition with their new book, The Literacy Workshop: Where Reading and Writing Converge. In this recent Teacher's Corner episode, they explain how they developed this idea, how it works in the classroom and remotely, and how their students responded.

It's the National Day on Writing® organized annually by the National Council of Teachers of English(NCTE)! And to help them celebrate we are aiming the spotlight on these wonderful titles that are packed with ideas on ways to enhance your writing instruction. Take a look.

Being a new teacher entering into the first year of teaching is always going to have its challenges. But this year? We're willing to bet that some trusted guidance is necessary. So since we can't be right there with you, we wanted to offer a list of new-teacher essentials that we think might help to have on your shelf for when you need advice from the experts. And while these books weren't written specifically for online instruction, the ideas can be applied in any setting should you find yourself teaching from home this fall.