There are different ways to become familiar with our nation’s founding documents: reading, memorizing, studying, reciting are a few. But in our keyboard- swipe-click-centered world, rewriting by hand is not one that immediately comes to mind. A story featured in the NYTimes The Constitution, By Hand (6/30/17) written by Morgan O’Hara explained her process for […]
Colette Bennett
Colette Marie Bennett is the Curriculum Coordinator for English Language Arts, Social Studies, Library Media, and Testing for the West Haven Public School System in West Haven, Connecticut.
Previous to this position, she served as the Chief Academic Officer (7-12) for Regional School System #6 in Litchfield, Connecticut. She has 23 years of teaching experience in English Language Arts from grades 6-12, including electives in journalism, drama, and film studies.
A graduate of the Alternate Route to Certification, Bennett also has a Masters in English from Western Connecticut State University a 6th year in Advanced Teaching and an 092 Administrative Certificate from Sacred Heart University, and graduate credits from the GLSP in Social Studies at Wesleyan University. She holds a Literacy Certification (102) from Sacred Heart University for grades K-12.
She has presented how technology is incorporated in classrooms at the Connecticut Computers in Education Conference (2010, 2012, 2014), the National Council of Teachers Annual Conference (2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015), and the Advanced Placement Annual Conference (2011) the Literacy for All Conference (2012), and the ICT for Language Learning in Florence, Italy (2014).
She blogs about education at Used Books in Class: http://usedbookclassroom.wordpress.com/
She tweets at Teachcmb56@twitter.com
Posted inBook Review
A Comic Book Helped to Inspire the Civil Rights Movement
My school district recently purchased a class set of the March Trilogy, the graphic novel memoir that recounts the experiences of Congressman John Lewis (5th District, Georgia) in America’s struggle for civil rights including the marches from Selma to Montgomery. The comic book-style illustrations are engaging and some may mistake the memoir as something for children. Lewis’s experiences in the […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Eat Your Vocabulary– It’s Good for You!
“If music be the food of love,” as Shakespeare suggests, then the food for the mind is vocabulary. The term vocabulary is defined as “a list or collection of words or of words and phrases usually alphabetically arranged and explained or defined.” There are a number of reasons to think about these lists of words and phrases […]
Posted inCurrent Events in Education
“Letters Prove G. Washington a Coward!”- Fake News, circa 1776
Click bait headlines, such as the one above, may not have been “liked” instantaneously around the 13 original American colonies, but fake news and misinformation was still a factor in the news cycle of 1776. A close look at American history reveals that fake news has been around since the country’s inception, and even the honorable George Washington had […]
Posted inLiteracy
“Last Stop on Market Street” A Picture Book Hero’s Journey
“…and what is that award for?” the boy asked pointing to the right corner of the book. I was showing students in a 2nd grade class the cover of the picture book Last Stop on Market Street, written by American author Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson. The boy was pointing to a black medallion, pasted under […]
Posted inOpinion
Text Evidence in the Common Core: There Are Such Things as Facts
The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were released in 2009. They are now seven years old. I will admit that I was not initially enthusiastic about the English Language Arts literacy standards. I felt they were heavy in non-fiction…(no, wait.. heavy in “informational texts”). The CCSS suggested a typical student should have a reading diet filled with informational texts […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
Report Finds Students Cannot Google and Reason at the Same Time
If you Google the explorer John Cabot, you could get a web page from the website All About Explorers that states: “In 1484, the explorerJohn Cabot moved back to England with his wife and eleven sons. He developed his own website and became quite famous for his charts and maps depicting a new route to the Far […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
And then, the Plot Mountain Blows its Lid Off!
You probably have encountered the plot mountain diagram: Exposition. Rising action. Climax. Falling action. Resolution. The plot mountain diagram is taught with short stories in English Language Arts at different grade levels, but I suspect that like most graphic organizers, the plot mountain diagram is over-taught, especially in […]