Oz Lit Teacher Blog

I’m currently reading a fabulous biography on the life, times and writing of Banjo Patterson. I loved Banjo’s poems as a child and was thrilled to nab...

In my last blog post, I shared respected writing researcher Steve Graham’s uncomfortable revelation about The Writing Revolution: that despite being w...

With so much debate and noise in the world of writing instruction, it’s hard to know what actually works. So when I had the chance to hear from the wo...

A few weeks ago, I shared something in my fortnightly newsletter that was a surprising hit... a pile of fascinating facts about the dictionary! It mad...

There’s a well-intentioned (but problematic) practice gaining ground in schools right now… 

It seems that in a well-meaning attempt to reduce the (ve...

Around this time last year I invited a guest blog writer -my daughter Ashleigh-  to share some of the texts she has read to her students to celebrate ...

I’ve noticed a worrying trend in schools lately… 

With all the pressure to ‘catch kids up’, ‘prepare for the NAPLAN’, and ensure they’re ‘implementin...

In my last blog post, I shared three fab new mentor texts that you can use to help teach persuasive writing. One question I received after posting tha...

It’s NAPLAN season, which means it’s the time of year when teachers start reaching for the same old, tired, persuasive writing mentor texts.  

You kn...

The countdown to the start of the school year is ticking…

I don’t know about you, but my work brain is ON (and it does not understand the concept of ...