Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In episode #14, I bring you a darling (and fun!) first person essay project for fourth and fifth grade students! Writing first person essays can be challenging for students. They often want to go in and out of that first person (okay, not often…like almost always! Lol). But in this project, we narrow their focus down so much, give an amazing first person sample essay, and give them all the tools that they need to complete this project well.

Find everything you need here!

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In HIT #13, I bring you a super fun essay writing project of the 3 Paragraph Essay or the 5 Paragraph Essay variety! Yes, essay writing can be fun for students, especially when they learn how to write thesis statements, topic sentences, transition sentences, opening paragraphs, closing paragraphs and more!

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In Episode #12, I bring you part II of two parts of how to teach story writing for junior high and beyond! For years, I didn’t understand how to help my students write outstanding stories—stories in which they were able to include and elaborate on the goals and obstacles of their characters, show the progressive action (and how to create excitement through it), and  make it all happen within the space allotted for the project. Until…my first born son got into story writing as a hobby during high school. He spent many nights writing short stories, novels, and screen plays using the proper story writing techniques that he had learned through story writing books created for novelists.

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In episode #11, I bring you part I of two parts of how to teach story writing for junior high and beyond! Story writing elements can be challenging to teach to students. This is why a framework where they plug in the elements of protagonist, goals, obstacles, description, action, resolution, and more can be super helpful. Teaching story writing for junior high kids doesn’t have to be boring!

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In HIT #10, I teach the fun, valuable, and exciting skill of dialogue writing and short story dialogue for junior high and high school student. Of course, I have a mentor text/sample story with all of the elements AND a super fun writing project. (Oh, and free lessons…don’t forget the free lessons!)

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In HIT #9, I’m Suuuuper excited to teach you how to use my Checklist Challenge! Yep…. This editing and revising tool for young writers will make your life so much easier! You will come away from this episode with your own free Checklist Challenge to use with students in grades four through twelve, tips on TPA (teach, practice, apply), the how to’s of clear grading of writing revisions, and so much more!

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In HIT #8, I present two spelling practice tools that you can re-create for your students (or get one for free here!). I teach how I use my signature Spelling Notebook classify and categorize spelling words with similar phonetic components, word families, and structural analysis rules. Then I teach how to use my free tool, The Six S Spelling Secret Packet, to practice challenging words each week before a spelling test.

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach #7, I’m excited to bring you some tips for young writers, specifically descriptive paragraph writing for elementary students. I use one of my month-long downloadable books to teach a simple outlining approach called The Paragraph House Outline. Of course, any writing project needs to have all of the elements that a student needs to learn in order to complete that project, so I will walk you through the outline, writing, opening sentence, closing sentence, adverb addition, CAVES (five parts of a sentence), and simplified Checklist Challenge—all using a darling project of describing a character from the Beast’s castle.

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.

Welcome to HIT #6! In this episode, I teach you how I teach an amazing story writing method I call Twice-Told Tales (formerly Piggy-Back Stories). I developed this method and began testing it nearly twenty years ago with local students—and now it is in several of my print books (Meaningful Composition) and many, many month-long downloadable books. Today I walk the listener/viewer through an entire beginning lesson of the TTT, focusing on fourth through eighth graders.

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode. 

Welcome back to HIT #5! In this episode, I use one of my month-long downloadable books, Tools and Tricks II with a given source from the story of Pinocchio to explain how I teach outlining from given sources to students in grades two through six (and higher for remediation purposes). You get the three paragraph passage, outlining lines, student instructions, symbol box, and more to use with your own students!

Visit https://languageartsladyblog.com/howiteach for blog, video and Teacher's Notebook sheets for this episode.