Whether you've arrived here as part of the larger Gender Representation Unit, or while searching for a strong short story to use with your students, X: A Fabulous Child's Story by Lois Gould is perfect for your classroom. A copy of the story can be purchased online or downloaded from The Gender Centre (currently the fourth link from the top at the time … Continue reading X: A Fabulous Child’s Story – Literacy Skills Review
By confronting prejudices and allowing students to speak openly about their experiences, the foundation developed from from The Toy Box is strengthened with shared experiences and concepts. Students will look further into the gender normative roles they may feel they need to fulfill. This lesson is part of a large mini-unit on Teaching Gender Representation in the … Continue reading Gender Lesson: The Gender Box
Regardless of age, everyone has a memory of a toy that they loved when they were a child, or a toy they wanted but they were never given. The things we play with help determine the people we grow into. This lesson focuses on separating boy toys from girl toys while pausing to take a look at why we … Continue reading Gender Lesson: The Toy Box
One thing that few people realize is that not every picture on the internet is fair game for teacher use. At the end of the day, will you face legal reprimands for using a picture you downloaded from someone's website? Probably not. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to stick to using legal images. … Continue reading Pixabay: Royalty Free Stock Photos for Teachers and Professionals
There are few things more important than teaching students to view the world through a critical lens. "How individuals construct their social identities, how they come to understand what it means to be male [or] female ... is shaped by commodified texts produced by media for audiences that are increasingly segmented by the social constructions … Continue reading Teaching Gender Representation in the Media
Twine 2 is a piece of software that allows you to create Choose Our Way tales. In our last parts you learned about palm stories, familiarized yourself with the basics of choose our way tales, and then learned how to write basic choose our way tales. Now we'll look at how to digitize those tales using Twine 2. … Continue reading Using Twine 2 to Create Chooseable Path Stories
Palm Stories are short stories that students write using nothing more than the palm of their hand, and a little bit of imagination. Teachers ask students to close their eyes and picture a number of different things, making point form notes along the way. At the end of their meditative journey, they will have the … Continue reading Writing a Palm Story: Ideation for Creative Writing
Before you begin to write a Choose Our Way tale, like the Choose Your Own Adventure books you grew up with, you need to create a foundation where students understand the importance of allowing choice. So rarely are students taught to consider themselves as an active participant while reading, it may require a full class … Continue reading Writing Chooseable Path Stories with Your Students
Point Evidence Explanation paragraphs have all three requirements for supporting an opinion. The point is what the writer believes, the evidence is what the writer is using to prove their belief is true, and the explanation is an explanation of how the evidence supports the point. I use the following activity as a diagnostic to assess Reading and Writing knowledge. It … Continue reading Alligator River: Point Evidence Explanation Paragraphs
Choose Our Way tales (COWtales) are stories where the reader gets to make a choice about the direction the story will follow. By being an active participant in the story, readers are more engaged and willing to press forward through the text. COWtales have a number of branching plot threads, as well as a variety of endings. … Continue reading Introduction to Choose Our Way Tales
What Binder Education 