My students were stuck telling me a story’s problem and solution. Let’s get thinking!
Content Area: Language Arts
Improving “What’s The Chapter’s 🏛️ Big Idea?”
Here’s a Depth and Complexity question I found on an old worksheet: What title would you give this chapter? Explain why your title fits the chapter’s 🏛️ Big Idea. Sure, I’m using Depth and Complexity. But how am I asking students to think? Bloom’s Taxonomy is much more important than Depth and Complexity. (And it’s not […]
Don’t Just Paraphrase A Poem!
What if, instead, we re-wrote the poem in the style of a different poet?
Upgrading “Put The Events In Order”
I often see this question on language arts and social studies worksheets: “Put these events in order.” Yes, it’s low-level, but the real problem is that it’s a one-off. Let’s make a sequence of questions about the order of events.
Improving A Task About Designing A Character’s Bedroom
An under-developed task in which students designed a character’s room.
Going Beyond “Name That Genre!”
What can we do once students correctly identify a story’s genre?
Improving Identify the Figurative Language
What do we do after a student can identify the type of figurative language?
Practice Context Clues with Classics
Most context clue worksheets have incredibly low expectations.
Details Should Lead To A Big Idea
Here are two questions I’d ask students about a story What are three important 🌼 details about the main character? What is the story’s 🏛️ moral? Now, details naturally lead to big ideas. But in this case, I switched topics from “main character” to “big idea, ” which broke the natural movement. If I ask […]
Perspectives on Friendship in Charlotte’s Web
Asking students to “explain the importance” wasn’t as high-level as I thought.