-
Recent Posts
- What Do You See in a Character?
- The Love-Hate Relationship with Creativity
- Social Learning and Creative Writing
- Writing with Kennings
- No! I’m Not Insane
- Is “Show Don’t Tell” Good Advice?
- What Exactly is Imagery?
- The Writing Sampler
- Classics Don’t Qualify as Comps
- Dealing with Painful Critiques
- The Power of Laughter
- Scoring Your Sense of Humor
Archives
Meta
- Follow Write about what? on WordPress.com
Author Archives: knlistman
Talk to me
They stare at the blank paper, for the entire hour, as if somehow by staring they could force whatever vague ideas are floating around in their gray matter on to the paper. I walk by and ask “What is the … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching writing skills, Writer's resource
Tagged Essay, Graphic organizer, Information, Question, Student
Leave a comment
The real deal
“I rented a canoe on Saturday – it was quite an oar deal!” The students’ task was to describe the source of humor in a series of five puns. Then they developed their own set of puns. Despite the cheesiness … Continue reading
The unexpected discovery
Often when students are asked to write a personal narrative about their experiences we don’t expect a story, just a description of a lesson learned. I feel like throwing up my hands in frustration when a student says “I never … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching writing skills, Writer's resource
Tagged Arts, discoveries, journal, Narrative, Paris, Student
Leave a comment
A tale of two writers
Recently, I observed eighth graders working on a writing assignment. The prompt, “Write about a decision you made” was an uninspired one that usually failed to provoke much of a worthwhile response from struggling students. (Honestly, how many major decisions … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching writing skills, Writer's resource
Tagged learning disabilities, Writing, writing prompts
Leave a comment
Compositional Divide
Teachers have often heard how basic skills, such as memorization of content is required before higher level skills such as creating a new product can occur. Students are supposed to master how to recognize letters and sounds before combining phonemes … Continue reading
Posted in Teaching writing skills, Writer's resource
Tagged Literacy, Thought, Word, Writing, writing strategies
Leave a comment
How much is their work worth?
In 1992, Dallas Public Schools tried out a reading/language arts portfolio assessment. A research project examined how well this portfolio program worked and found that the school district was unprepared to provide the time, money and technical quality required to … Continue reading
Defining the portfolio
Do you regret the time lost with state mandated assessments? What if the products being assessed were actually part of the learning experience. That is one of the ideas behind the move to assess students through their portfolios. However, before … Continue reading
The case for the case
Portfolio – a portable case for holding papers – a simple name for a collection of works into which a person has poured hours of deliberation and sweat. Today the portfolio is just as likely to be stored on a … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, Education trends
Tagged creative portfolio assessment, Creativity, Education, John Baer, portfolio, Teresa Amabile
1 Comment
Elaboration: the hardest part of creative writing
Elaboration is the process of presenting and developing an idea, by adding more detail to explain the exterior situation so that the reader gains privileged access to interior thoughts of authors. Forming creativity into a product that someone else can … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, Education trends
Tagged Creativity, elaboration, Torrance Test of Creative Thinking
1 Comment
The ogre of orginality
The creative writer combines originality, complexity, independence of judgment, and aesthetic sensitivity according to the research of Frank Barron, who was known for his in-depth studies of the creative mind. His subjects often took extremely complex elements to produce a … Continue reading
Posted in Creativity, Education trends
Tagged Creativity, K through 12, originality, Torrence
2 Comments
Write about what? 