A photo of a woman's hands with yellow fingernail polish, she is holding a pen over an empty notebook. There is a a white border at the top of the image with pink and blue text that says "Writer's Workshop for Short Stories"

Host a Classroom Writer’s Workshop with Short Stories in 5 Easy Steps

Last fall, I did a Writer’s Workshop with my 9th graders to help them write their own short stories. We did this as part of our Dystopian unit, but the process works with any genre. In this post, I’ll cover the Writer’s Workshop process in my classroom, how I manage the reading load, and things I am still trying to improve. First of all, I combined my Writer’s Workshop with Dystopian Lit Circles last year and basically designed the unit to be a reading/discussion day and then a writing day. I thought I was breaking it up for the students and that they’d appreciate the break, but they told me that they felt like they couldn’t completely focus on one or the other. I think the solution would be to have students mostly finished with

Danielle Hall September 27, 2016

Evaluating drama can be tricky, but in the ELA classroom, it's important to still hold students accountable. Here's how I assess a variety of skills. This is a mix of objective and subjective assessments every step of the way in the process of putting together a class play. This is applicable for every drama activity in the ELA classroom.

From Casting to Confidently Evaluating Drama in the ELA Classroom: An Actionable 5-step Guide on the Class Play

So, you’re considering doing a Class Play or you’ve started practices. Now, you’re wondering how evaluating drama will unfold. Or you’re wondering how to cast students or deal with irritation during rehearsals. This post breaks down the class play into 5 actionable categories to give you confidence in your drama unit! Drama in ELA: The Class Play In this series, I’m going to share my experiences integrating Drama in ELA and producing a class play with my 9th grade English class. Drama is so engaging for students, but is often put aside because it seems like a lot of work or doesn’t obviously correlate to higher test scores. In this series, I’ll show you that Drama in ELA is not only possible, but beneficial to all students. How to Set up and Cast the Play When I first

Danielle Hall August 16, 2016

I finally nailed teaching symbolism to my students! Using candy was both efficient and engaging, and they kept referencing this lesson for the rest of the year. This strong foundation really helped their literary analysis skills. TeachNouvelle.com

Teaching Symbolism with Candy

I have been reflecting on my favorite lessons from the school year, and one of the most fun and effective was teaching symbolism with Tootsie Roll Pops! Not only were the students enthusiastic about eating the candy (because aren’t they always?), they really grasped the concept of analyzing a symbol. We were nearing Halloween and deep in our Short Stories unit, and I planned for my 9th graders to read “Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe. They had already told me in their journals that they didn’t “get” symbolism. I wanted to help them learn to take apart symbols and analyze them based on concrete details before adding in the abstract traits and drawing a conclusion. Basically, I wanted to help them break down symbols and realize that there was a lot

Danielle Hall July 5, 2016

A photo of rows of empty, red velvet covered theatre seats looking towards the stage with a golden curtain down across the state. There is a blue box in the center of the image with white text that says "Drama in the ELA Classroom - Improv Games"

Drama Games for High School: 3 Easy Improv Games

Are you looking for ways to integrate drama games for high school? Get started with these three zero-prep improv games! Why drama games? I have loved drama since my 3rd-grade class got to be Arabian dancers in the school’s performance of “The Nutcracker”. When I was in middle and high school, I always wanted to do “acting” options for projects, sometimes asking my teachers ridiculous things like “can I show you the parts of the cell as an interpretive dance?” As a teacher, I seek to give my students the same opportunities. Drama in the ELA classroom is a great way to build public speaking skills, memory, and community. I have used drama with grades K-12 in France, Germany, the US, and Puerto Rico, and students beg for more. Literally. After finals one year, I

Danielle Hall February 21, 2016

Independent Reading in High School

How to Keep Kids Reading in High School One of my biggest goals as a high school teacher is to help my students love reading. I am an avid reader, and hit my book challenge for the year (75 books – woo-hoo!), and I want my kids to find books that they can connect with. I see the primary blogs talk about guided reading, group reading, and Drop Everything And Read!, and I want that for my classroom, too. Getting kids to love reading in high school should be more of a priority, I decided. This year, after doing some research and reading a great post by Laura Randazzo, I decided to implement Student-Selected Reading (SSR) in my classroom. I’ve done it for a semester now, and here’s how it’s going. 1. Implementation – Reading

Danielle Hall January 5, 2016

Interactive Notebooks for High School

Are you looking for ways to use Interactive Notebooks for high school English? When I was first faced with this possibility, I was super excited!, but had no idea where to start. I wasn’t sure if these would be the right tool for my 9th graders. I decided to start off the year with my normal Short Stories Unit, and slowly found ways to transform those lessons to ISN spreads. Over the course of the unit, I discovered that Interactive Notebooks gave me a great structure for planning lessons, a lot of scaffolding for my students, and very rigorous, focused practice of a new skill before they left me each day. Check out this 2 minute video to see how I set up Interactive Notebooks for high school English: Interactive Notebooks in ELA To make

Danielle Hall October 14, 2015

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