Practicing What You Pin... Another Success Story!

About twenty times a day Every now and then, I stumble across a technique or strategy or product on Pinterest that I pin, but never try. I have about infinity of these pins scattered throughout my many Pinterest boards. Anyway, this year, I've vowed to change that! I'm determined to try out at least one pin per week, be it something for my classroom, or a recipe, craft idea, life hack...

So, here is one of my most favorite finds ever! I cannot even tell you how stoked I am to have tried out these little gems and what a huge impact they've made on my writing instruction.

These are Janet Malone's Transition Tickets and they are seriously the BOMB!! Watch her video about them here.

Basically, this product contains a ton of "tickets" that have transition words or phrases that students can use to write a paragraph. And these aren't just your usual line of transition suspects, like, "first," or "then," or "finally." These are great words and phrases that will instantly smarten up anything your students are writing.

So far I've had my students use these to:

• answer constructed-response questions
• summarize short stories or chapters of a novel
• write opinion paragraphs
• respond to a compare and contrast or argument prompt

What I love most about these is that they give a jumping off point for a writing piece that may be difficult or intimidating. This is HUGE for reluctant or struggling writers! Also, now that my students have been using these for a while, I am noticing more and more that they will use these stems when writing on their own, which is obviously the goal!

So, what do you think? Can you find a use for these Transition Tickets in your classroom? If you try them, let me know how it goes and how you used them.

Happy Teaching!!