Check Out These Clever LEGO Adaptations of Famous Works The Literacy Site By The Literacy Site LIT_Blog_DTOP_BelowTitle_336x280 Similarity Check - Crossref For editorial originality, Similarity Check helps editors compare the text of submitted papers for similarity. Similarity Check is a service for editors who want an extra check. The service helps our publisher members to actively engage in efforts to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism by providing their editorial teams with access to Turnitin’s powerful text comparison tool, iThenticate. With editors under increased pressure to assess higher volumes of manuscript submissions each year, the iThenticate tool provides immediate feedback regarding a manuscript’s similarity to other published academic and general web content.
@mrocallaghan_edu image via @gapingvoid Challenge (includes differentiation) Explanation 50 Writing Prompts for All Grade Levels The collection of prompts below asks young writers to think through real or imagined events, their emotions, and a few wacky scenarios. Try out the ones you think will resonate most with your students. As with all prompts, inform students that their answers should be rated G and that disclosing dangerous or illegal things they’re involved in will obligate you to file a report with the administration or school counselors. Finally, give students the option of writing “PERSONAL” above some entries that they don’t want anyone to read. We all need to let scraggly emotions run free in our prose sometimes. If your class uses daybooks (an approach recommended in Thinking Out Loud: The Student Daybook as a Tool to Foster Learning), wait for composition notebooks to go on sale at Target, the Dollar Store, or Walmart for $0.50 a piece.
The Questioning Toolkit - Revised The first version of the Questioning Toolkit was published in November of 1997. Since then there has been substantial revision of its major question types and how they may function as an interwoven system. This article takes the model quite a few steps further, explaining more about each type of question and how it might support the overall investigative process in combination with the other types. photo ©istockphoto.com Section One - Orchestration Game of Awesome / Teaching & learning resources / Success for Boys - Success for Boys Game of Awesome is a card game for 3-6 players designed to engage and inspire kids, specifically boys, to tell stories and learn to write. Playing the game helps students generate ideas quickly which they can explore, expand and write stories. The basic game has been produced as four sets of cards containing topics, themes and ideas that students years 5-8 will find interesting, involving and often ridiculous! The cards can be used independently or mixed and matched to create new combinations and infinitely more ideas.
Some Good Writing Apps for Middle School Students Below is a collection of some good iPad apps to use with your middle school students. These are apps to help students enhance their writing skills and improve their grasp of language. Some of the things they can do with these apps include: access tons of creative writing prompts, use pre-made story templates to organize and plan stories, use Story Builder to improve paragraph formation and integration of ideas, create ‘found poetry’ by selecting from word banks and existing popular works… and many more. Links to the apps are under the visual. 1- Shake-a-Phrase ‘Shake-a-Phrase is a fun language app for creative writing prompts, vocabulary, and parts of speech practice.
Control Alt Achieve: Black Out Poetry with Google Docs March 21st is World Poetry Day, so this is a good time to revisit some ideas for creative ways for students to write poems. In the past I have shared activities for Random Writing Prompts for Poems, as well as drag-and-drop "magnetic" poetry templates in a Winter Theme and a Valentine's Day Theme. Another fun way to engage students in poetry is by having them create "Black Out" poems. Basically you give the student a page of text pulled from a book, article, websites, or such. The student then blacks out all of the text, except for the words they want to leave behind to form a poem.
A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ Fairy Tale A curious introduction to a classic fairy story How old do you think the story of Rumpelstiltskin is? It was famously included in the 1812 volume Children’s and Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm (a book that’s better known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales), but many of the tales written down by the German siblings were of a considerable vintage by then. The surprising thing is that the story of Rumpelstiltskin – albeit under a different name – is thought to be some 4,000 years old. To put that in perspective, that’s over a thousand years before Homer, and roughly contemporaneous with the earliest surviving versions of the tales that comprise the Epic of Gilgamesh, widely regarded as the oldest epic.
Why and How to Use YouTube Video Essays in Your Classroom Like many of you, I've been thinking a lot lately about how we can better prepare students to be thoughtful, responsible, and critical consumers and creators. While I don't have all the answers, I've come to one conclusion: Media-literacy education must deal with YouTube. Ninety-one percent of teens use YouTube.