Classroom Posters on Pinterest

Did you know "The Writing Doctor" (aka Bill MacDonald) has a board on Pinterest?
Well, he does, so go check it out!
It really is a quick, easy way to browse through the many language arts classroom posters and other teaching aids and an convenient way to share them also.

Writing Doctor on Pinterest

Test your students' ability to write a focused essay.

The organizational strategy your students use improves their ability to present ideas clearly and effectively.  This exercise will allow you to test their ability to write a focused essay in a fixed amount of time.

On Your Mark. Get Set. Stop! 
Timed writing responses are one quick way to test a students ability to write a focused paper.  It is similar to Sustained Silent Reading, (S.S.R.) only the children are writing until the time runs out instead of reading. Give them a prompt or topic to
write about and explain the goal: to keep writing on the topic as long as possible without switching to another point or different focus. This activity forces them to learn to develop an idea completely without getting sidetracked by extraneous information that adds no depth to their writing. The winner is the student with the most writing that sustains the purpose
and builds one sentence upon the other without getting off-topic.

Encouraging higher level vocabulary from your students

Word Bank 
As you read your students' papers, you will come across several compositions that use higher level vocabulary instead of the easy to write, low level words. Each time you find one of these words, and it is used correctly in context, the student has passed the part of
vocabulary that has to do with application. For these students, you can use the idea of extrinsic motivation by writing their names on the back of tickets and placing them inside the "Word Bank". Every week or so, have a raffle and give some sort of prize to the students whose names you pull out of the bank. (whatever is appropriate for your class).  After just a few weeks, you will notice a tremendous increase in the amount of higher vocabulary that they are choosing.
A caution here is to be sure the words make sense and fit where they're placed. In my own classroom, I also gave out bonus tickets for the first person quiet, for homework completed, or any other important classroom procedure that students were following, or things I wanted to reinforce as a teacher.
~Bill MacDonald, The Writing Doctor