Lexiphile

This is my 13th year teaching middle school, and I have also taught high school for several years. 6th grade is my sweet spot, though, and I love to create innovative, funny, challenging and active ways for my students to engage with literacy and especially writing. I have been writing all of my own curriculum and materials for more than a decade, each year tweaking and adjusting based on what worked for my students this year and what didn't. I've worked with students from many different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds in Florida and in Colorado, as well as students with additional learning needs.

If you are looking for something unusual, lessons that look, sound, and feel different from what you would find in a textbook or a standard curriculum, then you are in the right place. This is not your mama's English class. We don't do 'boring' here. Grammar workbooks and textbooks are often where creativity and engagement go to die, leading to generations of adults who recall their grammar classes with a shudder. But grammar is fascinating! It's the logic of language, and there are so many ways to have fun with it while challenging students to be critical thinkers and puzzle-solvers, as well as better writers! I kick off my Apostrophes Unit by dressing up as the Apostrofairy, and we spend a week playing active games in the ApostrOlympics to get students out of their seats as they practice sorting types of words that do or don't get apostrophes. My students get to use their creativity, their energy, their critical thinking, and their voices to build their skills in my class, and they get to laugh a lot and play learning games that give them the repetitive drill practice that they need in order to internalize important grammar rules without wanting to beat their brains out with a semicolon. (I SWEAR I have kids every year who ask for more of my sentence structure worksheets, and usually it's the kids who are hardest to engage in general!) My lessons appeal most to students who don't learn as well from the traditional lecture/drill/test model of teaching, especially those who need to get out of their seats sometimes and really engage with the content. I use games, competitions, songs, worksheets with funny sentences, art projects and active games to give kids the practice they need while inflicting minimal trauma and boredom. My lessons center Student Talk and give students opportunities to collaborate and build mastery through a gradual release of responsibility. So if you want to shake things up in your classroom and get your least motivated student all hot and bothered about homophones, try out some of my products with your students.

Winner of The Rae Harris Curiosity Award- 2022 Was once described in a holiday card from a student as "The bast teechr in the word," (and consequently a big believer in spelling tests.)

Bachelor's Degree in English Master's Degree in Teaching

I spent a few months in 2012 teaching English to Tibetan monks and political refugees at the temple of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, where I once had a class disrupted by monkey theft!