August 10, 2026 Dear Fellow Educators and Storytellers, I sit here at my kitchen table, the bright summer sun filtering through my window, a stack of books next to my computer. As I sit here to write this letter to you, I picture you receiving it in...
The tables turn in this episode of Corridor Conversations as Elementary Cohort member and guest host Victoria Dotson asks questions of Gary R. Gray Jr. in a conversation about how his experiences as a writer shape his teaching. He shares how...
Author and educator Stella Villalba explores conferring as an ongoing, collaborative process that centers students’ voices and builds on what they already know. Discover how a strength-based approach to conferring can help educators honor students’...
This downloadable offers a playful, invitational approach to helping young writers notice and experiment with the ways authors and illustrators create meaning. Using favorite books as mentor texts, teachers can guide students to wonder, compare and...
Dear teachers, It’s a morning in January, and we’ve been committed to a writers' workshop for five months now. Fifth-grade students are confident in their role as authors and take their job of creating and sharing their voice very seriously. Our...
Zines—small, self-published booklets that combine writing, images, and design—offer a creative and accessible way for students to experiment with multimodal composition. This downloadable resource by Shawna Coppola introduces the history and purpose...
It is important for students to understand the power of writing. Writing is a form of communication, and it is everywhere. When you walk into my kindergarten classroom, you will see writing everywhere in a variety of ways. The displays, shelves, and...
Imaginative, engaging, captivating, exciting. These are all words to describe how I felt about writing growing up. As an elementary student, writing was my favorite school subject—a place to escape and be creative. Developing characters, writing...