Looking at these documents, you may think I am a little bit crazy. I am okay with that. However, I am excited to have a go at this project with my third hour group. I am constantly evaluating how I end a novel unit, and I enjoy reflecting on the type of paper writing I express as important to my students. When my grade-level colleague and I attended MCTE in October and listened to Kelly Gallagher, we got excited about the idea of a multi-genre project with our sixth graders. We teach a variety of paper genres throughout the school year, including the five-paragraph essay, but we wanted students to get a chance to be innovative and inquisitive about the world around them.

Essay Packet: a workbook for students that contains all the steps of the specific essay assignment included; life saver for the teacher of writing; communication method for parents

In part 5 of the Compare/Contrast Essay Series, we explore the beauty of rough draft feedback.

Time for the handing back of rough drafts! Students have put together their introduction rough drafts, body paragraph rough drafts, and conclusion rough drafts to form a first draft of their Compare/Contrast Essay about the topic:

Is our modern American society more similar to or different from the Uglies Dystopian Society/World?

My love-hate relationship with technology in the classroom continues as I reflect on the use of Padlet for conducting a peer review. I like visual feedback. I like looking at how different people respond to writing, and I like seeing how different teachers use feedback to help their writers improve. Students created their first rough draft of their Dystopian Compare/Contrast Essays for a peer review after they participated in a Conclusion Workshop.

Welcome to the second part of the series The Essential Guide to a Compare and Contrast Essay! Today, Advanced English 6 and I went through our adv-compare-contrast-essay-2017 packets and checked off what we had accomplished so far.

The assignment? A compare and contrast essay. The goal? Survive. While this seems dramatic sometimes, most of my students are really excited about their creative writing assignments that involve creating their own dystopian worlds. However, many are not as excited as the complementary assignment of a compare and contrast essay with comparing our modern American Society with the Uglies Dystopian Society. I have a secret...I may be more excited about the academic formal paper (and you know I love creative writing). This will be the introduction to a five-part series about how to craft a Compare and Contrast essay with a focalized topic.