ELA The Miss M Way

Educators, after 10 months of countless hours of prepping and teaching, the summer months should be all about YOU.   Use this well-deserved time to recharge.   Engage in activities that bring you joy - reading, jogging, napping, you name it!  Focusing on yourself fuels you with a necessary recharge.   Bonus points if that recharge sparks ideas to incorporate into your lesson plans for the next school year or sparks ideas for your "Teacher-Gram" social media account.   😊   There is a good chance that you will spend some of that summer "me time" thinking about your previous and future students and maybe even your class materials – that is okay.  Heck, those thoughts speak to your commitment to be an educator, specifically a concerned and caring teacher.   But remember, summer break is a time for you to be selfish - seriously, but in a positive way, of course! As an educator who did not practice self-care often enough during the rookie stage, please l

When I first realized I had to incorporate analytical essay writing into one of my units for my sixth grade honors classes, I panicked as a rookie might do.   I had never instructed students on this type of essay writing before, so I went to the handy dandy internet to find tips on how to do so.   Despite my gratitude for the abundance of resource on the world wide web, I was still nervous.   I feared that I would not explain the concept well and feared that my explanation would, quite frankly, be boring.   The students in my honors classes were very studious, eager-to-learn, kind-hearted individuals, so I was fearful that my lack of experience in teaching this material would be a disservice to them (again, a feeling that I felt as a rookie teacher).     Essay Writing And Pizza While embarking on what seemed to be the impossible (aka teaching my students about analytical essay writing), I did not get past explaining that an analytical essay has a thesis before one of my c