Julie Patterson
writing, teaching, and developing strategic content
Archives
Reading Like a Writer: Looking closely at “Speech Class”
In this post I wrote for the Partnership for Inquiry Learning, I share what happened when I looked closely at poems with a handful of middle grade elementary teachers. We noticed how and why poets might use dialogue in a poem.
Read More3 Things I Wish I’d Understood Sooner about Conferring with Young Writers
3 Things I Wish I’d Understood Sooner about Conferring with Young Writers In this post I wrote for the Partnership for Inquiry Learning, I share what I learned from visiting consultant Matt Glover that completely changed my thinking about conferring…
Read MoreFeedback is important (and I mess up sometimes)
In the first post in this series, I was thinking about the feedback I give student writers. That leads me to another big observation: sometimes I mess up, perhaps even bad enough to set a kid back a little. Learn more about two conversations with students that I’d like to redo.
Read MoreFirst, convince them they ARE writers
This semester, I teach writing in pre-K on Wednesdays, and writing to college students on Fridays. I’m quickly discovering that the only real difference is the texts I use.
Read MoreTeaching point: writers don’t rely on punctuation to convey emotion
Good narrative writers don’t rely on punctuation to convey emotion. Good writers know that characters convey emotion. Their body language, their actions, and their speech reveal what they feel.
Read MoreConferring with Young Writers: 5 Quick Reminders
Originally published in April 2015 and updated this month, teacher/consultant Mary Roderique and I offer five quick reminders and how-tos for conferring in writing workshop.
Read MoreWays to celebrate, publish student writing
What do you do at the end of unit of study? Your students have spent weeks cultivating their texts through a complete unit of study…What do you do to reward their efforts and emulate “publishing” for an audience beyond the teacher?
Read MoreLooking closely at upper grade students’ nonfiction
With Katherine Bomer’s book HIDDEN GEMS in mind, I take a close look at a text by an upper grade student and offer my analysis of what’s going well, what I’d teach next.
Read MoreA Unit of Study in Poetry
Get a step-by-step tour of how you might teach a poetry unit. Sample mini-lessons, noticing charts, conferring videos, conferring notes and more are included. Also includes “Teacher Try-Its” to help you fill your own writer’s notebook with material that you can teach from!
Read MoreNotebook strategies to help generate and revise poems
Here are five notebook strategies that can support your poetry unit. They also fit or could be adapted to other units of study. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to teach the same notebook strategy in multiple units—that demonstrates how valuable the strategy is across genres, subject matter, audiences, purposes, etc.
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