Don't Forget to Write

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  • I chose this book because after a couple of quarters ago when I had to create a two-week-long curriculum with lesson plans for each day I realized that creating engaging lesson plans to help these kids pursue their writing skills was extremely difficult. I was constantly questioning if what I was teaching them was even going to help them in their future classes. This book really gave me fantastic writing lesson ideas, and they were very easy to modify into my own curriculum. 

    I also chose this book because I really think if I hold onto it I can modify these lessons throughout my years of teaching in order to engage different classes on different subjects. This book even included rubrics which I think is fantastic because creating your own rubric can be very hard due to the fact you’re not really sure at first how to grade your students.
    1. College Application Essay Boot Camp.
    This writing prompt required students to research three completely different college application essays, then create their own essays to fulfill these prompts. It was a weeklong assignment, where the teacher would help polish their essays and guide them into the direction that colleges are accepting. I thought this prompt was fantastic because college admission essays can be extremely intimidating which can cause students to freeze when writing.   

    1. Literary Facebooks
    This lesson is where students create a mock Facebook profile based on their favorite literary character. This lesson ties in the interest of young adults’ social likes to e novel/reading. It requires them to learn about a literary character in detail, which ties them closer to the story that the character is in. This lesson can also help those students who aren’t confident in their writing skills engage more.

    1. Writing About Painful Things
    This book also offers an entire section on this topic which I believe is extremely important for kids to learn. Growing up, my journal was the only way I vented. I wrote about my day, every day along with details descriptions of the emotions I was feeling that day. It was a breath of fresh air for me because I was able to vent to myself. Students sometimes struggle with opening up/who they should open up to so, if we teach them a way they can open up to themselves, we might be helping many students daily struggles and feelings.
    The only problem I can see uprising from this book is perhaps that teachers might use it too much and rely on it for their lesson plans too much instead of possibly making their own. The lesson plans in this book are very easy to modify however I feel like this book should be used when you’re stuck, or to kind of give you that lightbulb effect when you’re making lesson plans. You should be able to make your own lesson plans over the years and make them genuine and unique to your own teaching. 
    I believe every educator should have this book, it really opened my eyes to writing styles and how to teach them in an engaging way.
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