After a little more than a year, Moore English is celebrating an anniversary–its 100th post! For the site’s one-year anniversary, I put together my first series about how teachers know when to teach a new text, how to find new texts, and how to introduce new texts.
For this anniversary, though, I decided to celebrate by highlighting my five most-popular posts. But I also wanted to share the five posts of which I’m most proud.
In celebrating 100+ posts, I’m also throwing a sale! So visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store today, 1/28, and tomorrow, 1/29, to get 20% off! Everything is on sale, so you can check out these best sellers:
- The Odyssey Ultimate Bundle
- ELA Task Card Bundle (180+ Task Cards)
- 4 Tools for Teaching “The Danger of a Single Story”
- Grammar and Vocabulary Fun Bundle (13 card sets, 350+ cards)
One other way I’m celebrating 100 is by giving Moore English some updates. Over the last few months, I’ve been revising past posts. And I’m also overhauling the website categories. In an effort to make the site easier to use, I’ve narrowed posts down to seven categories. Check them out here:
- Classroom Management and Organization
- Professional Development and Inspiration
- Instructional and Assessment Strategies
- Reflection and Goal Setting
- Educational Technology
- Reading Instruction
- Writing Instruction
This post this post may contain affiliate links. Please read the Terms of Use.
Celebrating 100: Five Top Post
Looking across the 100+ posts on Moore English, these are the five most popular! In the interest of celebrating this anniversary, I’ve “refreshed” each of these posts to include new suggestions, ideas, and inspiration!
5. Communists and Witches: Teaching The Crucible: For me, teaching and “acting” out dramas with students is a wonderful way to promote engagement and active learning. And Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a testament to this. Check out this post for ideas about how to build context for McCarthyism and the Salem Witch Trials. Additionally, there’s some awesome ideas for critical readings of the text.
4. The Great Gatsby Paired Texts: Ideas and Inspiration: Although I graduated high school without having read The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is a classroom staple. However, the text is not without its problems. For this reason, I put together a list of texts to teach alongside The Great Gatsby. With this in mind, these texts provide teachers with opportunities to interrogate the text and to attack it from multiple perspectives. Check out all the texts here.
3. Paired Texts for Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird: Like The Great Gatsby, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a classroom staple but also has its weakness. With these limitations in mind, I put together a set of texts that would help teachers focus on skills and on alternative perspectives of the text and its characters. Check out all of the texts here.
2. 8 Paired Texts for Teaching Things Fall Apart: This is one of my earliest posts for Moore English! And Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart remains one of my favorite texts to read with students. Overall, the texts in this unit promote synthesis-level thinking and help students move across a variety of texts, including poetry, nonfiction, and videos. Check out all of the texts here.
1. Are You Making These Seating Chart Mistakes?: When I wrote this post, I never thought it would be (by far) the most-popular post on Moore English! To this day, using seating charts remains a central piece of my classroom management.
Five Posts that Make Me Proud
While each post brings me a certain degree of pride, these are the five posts that most powerfully resonate with me.
5. 4 Steps to Pre-Read ANY Nonfiction or Informational Text: After years of knowing exactly how to prepare my students for annotating a poem, this year I developed a similar system for attacking nonfiction and informational texts. And these are steps that ANY reader can use. Read about all of the steps here.
4. 5 Things That Scare Me In Education, and 5 That Give Me Hope: Last year, I heard a radio broadcast that inspired this post. And it’s one of the first posts I wrote that speaks candidly about education. For me, the process of writing this post helped me find my voice as a writer. And it’s this post that paved the way for similarly candid posts.
3. Why I’m Not the “Cool” Teacher: After a compliment from a student, I began to reflect on what it means to be “cool.” While “cool” might be a compliment for students, I think there are most interesting things for a teacher to be.
2. Confessions of a Recovering Teacher Martyr: This post does not have blockbuster numbers. But this is one post that I continually think about in my day-to-day teaching. As I make choices about my professional life, I regularly think about the importance of a school-life balance. And this post encapsulates my strategy for achieving a healthy balance.
1. Teaching for Social Justice is an Obligation: This is the most-recent post on this list. But it took me a long time to articulate my beliefs teaching for social justice. In terms of posts on Moore English, this is the one of which I am most proud. It’s that important.
Celebrating the Next 100
As we enter 2020, I’m so looking forward to continue growing Moore English. What kinds of posts are you interested in? Let me know in the comments, send me an email, or visit me on social media. I’d love to hear what you’re looking for from Moore English!
