Recently, there’s been a trend in the messages I’ve received from the stellar stock of humanity known as you, the Teaching the Core readership (btw, if you ever need to contact me, just use this link — it goes straight to my inbox). Here’s what I’ve been receiving: life-improving, useful resources for 1) finding complex texts for […]
Going a Bit Deeper with the They Say / I Say Two-Paragraph Template
Two posts ago, I introduced Graff/Birkenstein’s two-paragraph They Say / I Say template I’ve been requiring my students to use in response to our argumentative Articles of the Week (and, by the way, articles of the week are the original idea of Kelly Gallagher). And as a disclaimer, I’m about to nerd out pretty heavily on […]
No More Painful Research
Note from Dave: A few months ago, my friend Deborah Owen of EinsteinsSecret.net approached me with an idea for a guest post on an approach to research that seemed pretty… well, non-freaked out. I immediately loved the idea of having Deborah share this approach to research with the Teaching the Core community because it’s a Common Core […]
A Simple, Two-Paragraph Template that Helps Kids to Really Argue
In the last post, I shared the new argumentative focus I’m experimenting with for the article of the week (AoW) assignment. Rather than choosing just any type of article, I’m looking for articles that argue. [1] It’s not exactly the discovery of the polio vaccine, but still, it’s pretty cool. I like this new focus […]
What Texts Does the Common Core REQUIRE Students to Read?
Although the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are rife with suggested texts and text types, there are several parenthetical remarks within the grade-specific reading standards that aren’t examples; they are to be included. Required titles RI.11-12.9 — that is, the ninth standard within the Reading Informational texts strand for grades 11 and 12 — is […]