Craft Close-Up: Word Biographies
A brief piece of writing that bring language and history to the forefront.
A little bit of business before we begin.
This is your LAST WEEK to contribute book you’ve loved this year to our What’s Best in Books guide that’s coming out soon! I’ve also added a place for you to share your favorite pleasure reads from the midst of this school year! (You can edit your submission to add this if you’ve already shared your favorites!) Complete the survey here!
I am betwixt and between Google Drives right now as I prepare to leave the school that birthed The Moving Writers Community. This means that some links in some posts /documents are not working at the moment. If you run into a link problem, please let me know. I will be working on this as quickly as I’m able, but I am wrapping up a very long time in this particular classroom in the next two weeks, so a lot of my waking, non-teaching moments are devoted to packing. You can always email me at movingwriters@gmail.com.
This month’s Craft Close Up is a type of writing I discovered a few years ago, completely forgot about, and was delighted to see pop up once more.
Often as teachers, we are laser-focused on so many big, huge things we need to teach, that we feel we can’t spend time on the tiny details. I need to teach students to write a thesis statement that makes sense; I don’t have the time I wish I did to teach them about morphology. One of those things that often gets pushed to the backburner is vocabulary. You may already know about my love of exploratory vocabulary instruction. Things change for readers and writers when they become curious about language; in fact, if we can foster that, we’ve done a lot of our job right there.
The “word biographies” I’m sharing here are an extension of that work and curiosity — a brief essay exploring a word, its layers of meaning, its origin story, and why it matters right now.
Here are clean copies of the mentor texts! (I’m sharing three this time!) Then, I’ll show you my annotated copies, talk about lessons we can teach, and ways we could incorporate this into your classroom!
Annotated Mentor Text
While I’ve annotated three mentor texts this time, I am only going to show one of those in this space to give us a common text about which to chat. You can find a link to download all three below!
