InstaDigest: March 17-March 28, 2025

A peek into what I do every day with my students and what it looks like!

All March and April posts are free to unpaid subscribers of the Moving Writers Community so you can see if you’d like to become a paid member before our summer planning deep dive this summer! (We will also be piloting a NEW PLATFORM this summer that, I hope, will make our community easier and richer!) We’d love to have you!

---

Hello, there!

In pursuit of rethinking just about everything in my life right now, I’m also particularly interested in the InstaDigest feature. To that end, I’d be honored if you’d give me five minutes to complete a survey giving me a little bit of feedback about this regular MWC feature so I can keep it the way it is, improve it, or ditch it altogether if needed. Thank you SO much for taking the time to help me with this!

While I haven’t been in these parts recently, I have been at school. Life in middle school English marches on. Isn’t that generally the blessing and the curse of school? It’s unrelenting.

In 7th grade, we wrote listicles (a unit I shared with you at the end of 2024), did a mini unit on four modes of reading that I am very excited to share with you at some point, and have just begun a unit on writing open letters in conjunction with the New York Times student contest.

Truly, if you just follow the NYT student contest calendar and use their copious, brilliant resources, you don’t even need me.

In 8th grade, we studied Animal Farm and focused on symbols, motifs, and themes as well as strategies for close reading. And now we are in a joint Civics-English writing project that uses Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny (the graphic edition) as a mentor text for students writing their own essays in a compilation we will call On Freedom. (I’ve wanted to do a graphic essay unit with students forever. I am so excited.) I mean: just look at how cool this is:

Images from ON TYRANNY (Graphic Edition) by Timothy Snyder

Here are my daily lesson plans from the last two weeks:

What We Did

What It Looked Like

I’m experimenting this week and offering you a couple of resources from the above plans instead of photos. (Let’s be honest: I didn’t take any.) But this might impact your answers to the survey! So let me know how you like this switch!

Writing Workshop Process Tracker

I’ve done this off and on for a few years in my writing units. It’s kind of like an exit ticket in that it helps keep us all accountable and honest for actually using writing and conferring time. But it also, over time, helps readers begin to articulate their own, individual writing process. Tweak this to make it fit your writing unit!

Identifying Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

This one is pretty specific to the open letter unit my students are working on. And if yours are — or will be — writing open letters, great! Use it! I paired it with a simple Ted video. What I hope is help and transferable here is how I go from mini lesson to mentor text to revision in students’ own drafts within a one hour class period. The structure presented in the instructions helps me get it all done!

Keeping a Multi-Class Project Together

I’m sharing this NOT to share our unit plan with you (that will probably be coming down the road to your inbox someday anyway). But rather, I want to show you the “hub” document my colleague, Sam Futrell, and I create to get ourselves and all our students through a cross-curricular project. This hub doc gets everything in one place, helps us plan collaboratively, and ensures that students have the same information we do. Students know to go here if they are absent and miss something or need to revisit information taught in class.

I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment & let me know what you’re thinking about and how these resources might be useful for you!