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Dena Harrison: Write in the Middle...Homepage
 
 








© Dena Harrison at http://denaharrison.com.
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Welcome to my Website: Write in the Middle
Between teaching from your heart and teaching from your head, you will find the right way to teach writing...

Hello. My name is Dena Harrison, and this website contains many of my best lessons and favorite classroom resources that I have developed since beginning my career as an educator way back in 1992. I love teaching so much that I try to go the extra mile, especially when it comes to teaching my favorite subject...writing; each year, here in Northern Nevada where I call home, I create and coordinate writing workshops and inservice classes for my fellow teachers. What you will find on this webpage are the ideas and topics that are freely exchanged during the professional development responsibilities I require myself to do, because I know teaching classes for teachers helps me become an even better teacher of writing.

I teach middle school in Northern Nevada, and I am fortunate that I am my students' teacher for two years; they spend both their seventh and eighth grade years with me as their English teacher. During those two years, we participate in a writer's workshop, and my students proudly call themselves writers when they leave me and head off to high school.

In June of 2008, I said good-bye to a group of student writers whom I miss sorely; my eighth-grade class moved on to high school last Fall, and I will consider myself truly lucky if all my future new groups of students learn to write just half as well as those students whose unique and wonderful personalities I miss.

I have now spent an entire year with my newest group of seventh graders, and I am confident that, in their second year with me as their teacher, we will learn even more from each other, and that this group's uniqueness will continue to leave its lasting impression on me too.

I teach because I was meant to be a teacher. My students learn because I strive to teach them the power of knowledge. They express their knowledge in their journals and portfolios. At this website, I happily share lessons and resources that are used in my community of writers.

Serving Northern Nevada Students and my Fellow Teachers in 2009:

To me, the classroom is a sacred place, and my students' learning is the most important thing that happens within its four walls. I have always insisted on the highest of standards for both myself and my students. Pushing myself just as hard as I push my students, I am constantly "putting myself out there" by hosting classes for teachers, publishing new resources on-line, and participating in local workshops designed to improve education.

Below you will find information on three professional development opportunities I am helping to coordinate and teach this year. I hope to learn just as much from these experiences as the teachers who enroll.

Pinon Poetry Festival

My Brand New Inservice

A Growing On-Line Resource

In 2008, my husband and I were the invited guest presenters at the Northern Nevada Writing Project's Spring Poetry Festival. This year, they asked us back, and we are so very excited to be presenting a poetry lesson to the thirty teachers who attend with sixty of their students.

This year, we are presenting the "What If..." poetry lesson from the WritingFix website, which is based on the picture book by Regina Williams with the same title.

The festival "sold out" in February, but you can still access the lesson on-line, and after the festival, we will be featuring new student samples.

For April, I have designed a brand new inservice class: Improving Memoir and Narrative Writing with Fourth through Eighth Grade Students. Inspired by Ralph Fletcher's How to Writing Your Life Story as well as his own autobiography Marshfield Dreams, we will be exploring new ways to help student writers explore their own life experiences as topics.

Like the poetry festival, this class "sold out" way back in February, so we are already planning to offer it a second time in the Fall of 2009. Resources and lessons created by the class's participants will be featured at WritingFix's Narrative Writing Homepage.

Last Fall, working with my amazing colleagues Carol Harriman and Kay Henjum, we created a very useful set of annotated fifth grade samples that fifth grade teachers used as they prepared their students for the state writing examination. These annotated samples gave fifth grade classrooms the ability to assign and score three practice prompts for the upcoming writing test.

This spring and summer, Carol, Kay, and I will be creating a similar resource for fourth grade and eighth grade classrooms, and in 2010, we will complete the process by having sixth and seventh grade sets. All these resources can be found at WritingFix's Nevada Writing Test Homepage.

 

Here are some special, on-going events in my life you might be interested in monitoring:

I provide these photos for my seventh graders, for my family, and for anyone who might be interested. You can see more photos from my life by clicking here.

Our New Puppy...Bentley

After coming home from the Ruth Culham writing conference in Portland, Oregon, last July, we adopted a new puppy, giving us a total of three dogs...He is a Westie, and he has completed our family. I will post new pictures of him as he gets bigger.

This was the day we brought Bentley home. His bent ear helped us come up with the name Bentley. His ear has straightened out since then, but it goes back to "droopy" when he's really tired.

Our wonderful neighbors--Martha & Jim--gave Bentley a collar and a bunny chew toy. We took this picture of him and gave it to them, and Martha says she keeps it by her bed!

Tortoise Eggs! They should be hatching in October!
On July 1st, we woke up to find that our desert tortoise couple--Hawthorne and Esmeralda--had created eight eggs together, and Ezzy had buried them in the soil. It'll be too cold to let them hatch naturally, so we brought them inside and have placed them in an incubator. They are due to hatch some time in October. I will be posting pictures of their hatching so that I can share the event with my students.

This picture was taken the day that Bentley took over the tortoises' "tort-igloo," upsetting the mother-to-be, Esmeralda.

These are the eight eggs in their incubator. She actually laid nine, but the last must have broken as it slid into the hole she'd dug. Many of the eggs have a little yolk from the one broken egg on their shells.


Great news! I teach three trait-inspired inservices every year in Northern Nevada. Most of the materials from those classes materials can be freely accessed online! Click here to see the page.

Be sure to check out the page of resources I have been helping to build for Nevada students preparing to take the state writing test. Click here to visit the page.


March 2009: Improving Memoir and Narrative Writing with 4th-8th Grade Writers.

September 2009: Formative Writing Traits Data that Improves Instruction

Find out when this class is being offered by visiting the NNWP's Spring Inservice Page.


I just finished The Hunger Games and my students are devouring it. They recommended that I read Skeleton Creek, and so far I am very impressed with it.


I love the Magnetic Poetry site. See all my web favorites by going to my blue page.


Trust me, the NNWP's Writing Lesson of the Month Network is the best free thing you can sign up for on the Internet! Join here.


In Spring 2009, I posted two new iPod lessons and presented them at Rob Stone's iPods Across the Curriculum inservice. Visit my purple page to access all of my on-line lessons.


My Little Red Riding Hooks one-page resource has been featured in the NNWP's Going Deep with 6-Trait Language Workbook, their Secondary Writing Guide, and on the WritingFix website.

Come get your own copy at my pink resource page.

 

  

 

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