Category Archives: Cross Curricular Writing

November 8, 2018

East Central Ohio Educational Service Center, New Philadelphia, Ohio

And the winner in our acronym competition is… East Central Ohio Educational Service Center, New Philadelphia, Ohio supports teachers and students in – surprise, East Central Ohio. We’ve worked with their teachers and students the last couple years. As much as we enjoy our international travel we love working with our fellow buckeyes any chance […]


May 6, 2018

Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The American School of Lima

Sara and I spent just enough time at the Colegio Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The American School of Lima to know that we’d love to come back. This visit got squeezed onto the front end of our trip to Jakarta (because the two are so close to each other – sometimes we don’t even make sense to […]


April 25, 2018

Never Write a Rough Draft Again!

Why you should never write a rough draft. Well, first off, we believe that draft should be a verb in the writing classroom not a goal. Plus, there only seems to be two draft statuses – rough and final. We prefer to use the term Version – and title everything we begin working on Version […]


April 21, 2018

ABYDOS Literacy Conference – Dallas, Texas

It’s truly amazing that things work out as well as they do sometimes. The bluebonnets were blooming on the side of the road on our way from DFW to the Abydos Literacy Learning conference hotel. Alise and Emily were navigating us, darting back and forth with the assuredness of veterans of Dallas traffic wrangling. There […]


April 2, 2018

American International School of Bucharest

True story, we were surrounded by vampires. Okay, the American International School of Bucharest just may have the best school mascot ever. Who wouldn’t want to be a Fighting Vampire?! But, a boss mascot is not all the school has going for it. Librarians par excellence Stacey and John shepherded us through four fun and […]


March 26, 2018

Anglo American School of Moscow

The Cold War is ostensibly over but that didn’t keep us from being picked up from our Anglo-American School of Moscow provided apartment by a spy. Or so I suspected from the info sheet given to us by Kris one of the librarians at the school. K. will pick you up at 11am to take […]


May 4, 2017

Look what I found! A found poem lesson to augment novel study.

So what are we accomplishing here?

We are close reading a text as a group.

We discover themes of our literature.

We are collaborating to discern the importance of what we are reading.

We are taking collaborative research and writing as individuals.

We are getting hands on experience using poetic elements.

We are accepting the extra challenge.

We are working and succeeding through a bit of cognitive dissonance.

We are coming back together to edit and write a finished piece with a partner.

We are sharing our work with an audience.


March 30, 2017

Shanghai American – Puxi

That one day the poets showed up. Shanghai American School is split between two campuses on either side of the river. One side Pudong the other Puxi. The cool thing is the teacher bus for both campuses stopped at exactly the same place outside of our apartment ten minutes apart – so we had that […]


January 14, 2017

Police, Poetry, Pupils and Pedagogy

So armed with bags of pretzels we brought our two groups together for a little collaboration. The break down ended up with an officer at a table with six students. We had the officers and students talk about their experience writing poetry about personal conflict.


Testimonials

“Sara and Michael bring infectious energy and joy leavened with deep knowledge of best practices in literacy to their work with children and teachers.” Ellin Keene – Author of Mosaic of Thought and The Teacher You Want to Be
“Sara and Michael bring magic, and a contagious love of words to both students and teachers alike!” Georgia Heard - Author of Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School More testimonials...