Extensive Reading, Conquering Overwhelm and ONE KEY WORD to Improve Children's Writing
Become a better teacher with Substack #7
✨ I learn a lot from my colleagues and I’m sharing that here on Substack through my newsletter, How to be a Teacher.
🤌But Substack - wonderful place that it is - is also something my practice takes inspiration from.
🫶Therefore, I’d like to share what I’ve been reading because there’s a lot more for you to gain from it too. Finding these posts makes me a better teacher and arms me with more and more strategies that inform my practice with every passing week. If you’d like to benefit from this constant improvement as well, subscribe by clicking below to have these recommendations sent straight to your inbox.
📖Here are my favourite reads this week:
The Power of Extensive Reading in Language Learning and Teaching
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Reading is a rare example of a skill that appears in everything we do.
David uses this post to talk about the power of reading extensively - in other words, reading a wide selection of texts and dedicating a lot of time to them. (This differs from intensive reading, which is more about deep analysis of a single piece of text.)
The benefits of extensive reading are simple - children/learners soak up the words like a sponge that’s been dropped in a vocab bath so just having them read more and more makes a difference.
I taught a student in my first year of teaching who spoke no English having moved from Afghanistan. He took almost 400 books home from our school library that year and improve exponentially. Two years after me teaching him, he left for secondary school having passed all of his SATs papers.
He credits me with teaching him English, but I maintain that I didn’t - reading did.
Excellent post by
and a great lesson for any new teachers on the value of reading.
11 Small Steps to Move Forward When Overwhelm Paralyzes You
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I’ve got a job that’s facing me with a lot of overwhelm at the moment.
Fortunately, it’s happened before and I have a few strategies up my sleeve. My favourites are:
Tip #1 - Lower the bar (just open the laptop, step 1 done, that sort of thing).
Tip #4 - Anchor with dopamine (for me, I have a productivity playlist that comes out when I need to get something done. I even always start it with the same song then put it on shuffle).
I also use these with students. When writing (perhaps the most overwhelming lessons they do), I play the class playlist comprising of their personal favourites - Tip #4. I also find a couple of my students struggle to get started so we start small with an opening sentence that we write together - Tip #1. With that conquered, they’re off.
Great tips here for you if you face overwhelm but equally powerful strategies for students who display overwhelm or other symptoms of ADHD when working.
ONE KEY WORD
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If you teach writing, subscribe to Simon as soon as you’ve finished reading this: his newsletter is one of my favourites here on Substack and I think every teacher has a lot to learn from him.
This post was a timely one for my own practice. I actually stumbled upon the exact idea last year while teaching and applied it a couple of times but I’ve since forgotten about it. Thank goodness Simon’s here to operate as my own personal conscience.
That one key word he speaks of?
An emotion.
Focussing on a single key emotion in their writing allows children to lace their work with it. the characters adopt the feeling, the setting reflects it, the story and the situation propogate it and the atmosphere becomes all the more powerful as a result. It’s a sensational, yet simple, way to improve every piece of writing that every child writes and should be a non-negotiable when giving writing lessons.
Read the post by clicking the title above to find out how and why it works.
👋 Writing on Substack and reading the incredible wealth of other talented educators has made me a better teacher. If you’re a budding educator like me, subscibre below to make sure you get all these tips and more sent straight to your inbox. Like me, you’ll get better at what you do with every post.
This is a great initiative, Jack.
Thanks, Jack. I look forward to your recommendations every week. Excited to explore this week's suggestions :)