The Mysterious Benedict Society – Book Study Ideas After it was recommended dozens of times, I finally read The Mysterious Benedict Society and I wish I had read it sooner!
Classic Halloween Stories With Halloween approaching, it's a great time to expose students to some spooky classics. Lucky for us, many of these stories are in the public domain and freely available in many formats.
Inductive Thinking in Spelling and Vocabulary Let's look at a couple ways to bring inductive thinking into word studies. We'll examine simple plural rules all the way up to etymology of foreign words in English.
Don’t just list examples of writing techniques. Let’s improve Shakespeare! I stopped and started with "What 👄 special writing techniques does the author use? List examples."
Exploring Characters’ Virtues and Vices What separates a life well-lived from a poorly lived life? Aristotle believed it was moderation: too much of good thing can become just as much of a problem as too little. Looking at traits as excessive, moderate, or lacking is a unique take on character analysis.
Evaluating Characters on a Graph Here's an idea to integrate two-dimensional graphing with deep character analysis. Use the right characters, and you've got an exciting debate on your hands. Plus, it leads to a beautiful product that's perfect for Open House.
Think Like A Philosopher Up near the top of Bloom’s taxonomy is “evaluating.” A great use of this level of thinking is to evaluate a character’s ethical choice. But we can go deeper! Let’s ask students to evaluate characters’ actions based on another character’s point of view. To add another layer, we’ll teach kids about philosophers and use their points of view as well.
How I’d Change this Question from my Textbook Here are a dozen ways to transform a not-so-critical-thinking question from one of my district's textbooks.
