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Are you feeling inundated with paper in your writing workshop? Here are some quick tips to help you help your students organize their writing so that their desks and writing folders are less cluttered.

Thinking about your demonstration texts this way can give you some inspiration for multiple ways to teach the same minilesson, to the whole class, or to small groups as follow-up.

Looking for a summer project? Spruce up your teaching toolkit.

“Mom, you need to talk to Noah and tell him I need more cinnamon on my morning toast.” I raised my eyebrows at the first grader. “I doubt you need more. You already… Read More →

Unfortunately I don’t have a photo from one of my favorite Friday Favorites. Christy Rush-Levine and I met for a walk + dinner on Tuesday. Christy is one of those people who help… Read More →

In one of the kindergarten classrooms I’ve been working in, we’ve been learning: Writers share their opinions. This has been a unit of study inspired by the Common Core State Standards, which place a heavy emphasis on opinion writing. What does that look like in kindergarten, I wondered. So I’ve been trying out a few [...]

My daughter shook a paper in front my face, with her other hand on her hip she said, “I lost points because she [the teacher] said I have to add more details. How do you add more details to this?” I looked at her paper. At the top of the worksheet she wrote each of [...]

A swinging Mexican fiesta goes bad when a very hungry rotten avocado crashes the party and starts devouring the guests… Vegeterrible is a film about the last tomato’s fight for survival.

Great hand-drawn style to this student (student!) animated short, Vegeterrible. It’s the work of Danish animators Henril Sonniksen and Benjamin Neilsen.

(via Cartoon Brew)

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | One comment
Tags: Animation, student work

The latest short to come out of the Gobelins animation school is The Lighthouse Keeper, and it is stunning. So much suspense and beauty is packed into this three minutes of traditional 2D animation.

It’s the work of Gaëlle Thierry, Jérémie Moreau, Rony Hotin, Baptiste Rogron, Maïlys Vallade, and David François.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, Gobelins, student work, video

Animation collecive Vurup which comprises students from Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia, shares their new short film with us, Insert Coin.

It’s great to see students embracing traditional hand-drawn animation like this. Fun stuff!

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: Animation, Argentina, Colombia, mexico, student work, video

I quite enjoyed My Day, a film about personal space by animator Eamonn O’Neill.

Michael Stevenson created Pigeon Pilfer as his senior film at San Francisco State University. The Pigeon Pilfer website has some behind-the-scenes photos.

To commemorate the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, which occured 64 years ago today on August 6, 1945, Dan Blank presents his stop-motion film Shadowplay.

Dan writes:

Shadowplay focuses on the permanent shadows imprinted on the city’s walls & streets by the intense flash, creating indelible images from the exact moment the bomb hit. The film was created at NYU, and took two and a half years to complete. It won multiple awards, including a Student Academy Award and Student Emmy. I hesitated on posting it online for years, but felt it was better to have it available rather than let it sit buried on my hard drive. Thank you so much for helping share my work!

Visit Dan Blank’s website.

Katherine Bomer talked about celebrations this past summer at the TCRWP July Writing Institute. As I was planning my News & Announcements Charts for the upcoming week today, I found myself wanting to write about writing on four out of five of them. You see, I want my students to realize that their hard [...]

Today might be one of a handful of times I will ever teaching Writing Workshop after lunch when my kids come back from dance. (I LOVE teaching writing in the morning. When I was in NYC, my principal gave me special permission to do this since we were supposed to teach it in the [...]

Literacydetails’ Post reminded me of a conversation I had with the student who inspired the SOLSC. He confided in me about a week or so ago. Here’s a close approximate of the conversation: I walked into the hallway and saw C standing at his backpack shaking his head. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Ms. Shubitz, [...]

I’ve been working alongside Colette Berg & Melissa Possell in their first grade rooms. We’ve been having students do a lot of collaboration as they make their first foray into poetry. Last week we taught them one secret of poets — Poets see ordinary stuff in new ways. Then we make “poet [...]

Castrillo de Murcia, Spain

Coordinates: 42 21 N 4 3 W

Population: 246 (2006 est.)

Certainly Pamplona’s running of the bulls and possibly the annual city-wide tomato fight in Buñol are well known outside of Spain, but the number of people aware of this Catholic country’s baby jumping tradition (yes, you read that right), is probably a lot smaller. (more…)

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