With a new school year upon us, it’s time to re-energize your teaching practices with some new routines and resources. Here are ten teaching resources and
In an effort to support my fellow English teachers during this crazy time, I've collected some helpful freebies for you to use during your digital learning. Jus
Pixar short films are a great way to target essential literary elements and techniques from characterization to theme to conflict to symbolism. These Pixar short films inspire class discussion and analysis, and students can then in turn write essays based upon these films. They are an excellent to
This past school year was a great one. With every school year that passes, I like to take a moment and reflect on activities that were successful in the
If you are looking for short films to use in ELA lessons that challenge, inspire, and engage your students, then this blog post is for you!
This first quarter ELA curriculum guide is intended to help English teachers of grades 7-12 develop, tweak, or add to a first nine weeks curriculum. Suggestions are included that can be used across grade levels to introduce, review, or master key concepts and hit important learning objectives.
Hey Friends!! It's been a minute!Let me just start by saying that I've had such a great summer. I had intended to do a lot of work, but I just couldn't. I needed a little
Thinking of trying a flipped English classroom? Whether you're doing it to increase active learning or for virtual classroom needs, start here.
One of the first things teachers learn in their pre-service teaching classes is the importance of establishing effective classroom routines and procedures for
Teaching theme will be engaging for your students with videos! Find the 5 Best Videos for Teaching Theme in your ELA classroom.
When I think about student writing, one of the most difficult concepts to teach is sentence fluency. Much of excelling at fluent writing revolves around students’ background with literacy. Certainly,...
Warm ups, bell ringers, do now's (whatever you'd like to call them!) - this post walks you through how to use bell ringers in an effective and powerful way!
Engage your students in great lessons using these videos for teaching figurative language! Check out the Top 5 here and save time searching!
Pixar short films are a great way to target essential literary elements and techniques from characterization to theme to conflict to symbolism. These Pixar short films inspire class discussion and analysis, and students can then in turn write essays based upon these films. They are an excellent to
Looking for Wordle classroom ideas? Incorporate Wordle into your classroom with this activities, ideas, and templates.
Looking for games to play with a classroom? This list of English games in the classroom is exactly what you need to engage students!
If you’re looking for some fun reviews to mix into your lessons this year, here are a few ways to use these ELA Digi-Games to mix things up a bit!
With distance learning in full swing, here’s a closer look at ten resources that English teachers can digitally assign their students. All of my SMARTePlans
Whether you're teaching a communications elective, a journalism class, or really, any ELA class at all, there is so much to tap into in the world of modern media. The process of sharing ideas in
The One Pager Project is a creative and engaging way to assess student understanding on a variety of topics. This blog will explain exactly what a One Pager is, how to use one, provide you with plenty of One Pager examples, and even give you the opportunity to grab a free One Pager template. While
These engaging 6th grade short stories are a fantastic resource to help you teach reading in your middle school ELA classroom.
The teenagers in your class are online more than any other generation before. Sure, they’re reading articles and consuming ebooks, but more...
“Everyone is telling me to teach grammar, but no one has told me HOW yet! There’s so much information and so many ideas, and I’m just overwhelmed!” If you’ve ever...
This is a culmination of my own anchor charts, plus the best anchor charts that I could find online. This is a great place to find effective charts that get to the heart of what you are teaching in workshop. If you have a favorite chart that you'd like to add, please contact me! Also, if I have not properly given credit for an anchor chart, let me know so that I can fix it.
Engage students in meaningful poetry reading and writing activities. Here are SEVEN assignments both secondary teachers and students will enjoy.
By The Daring English Teacher When starting a new school year, one of the most important and beneficial things a teacher can do in the classroom side from building classroom community is to take some time at the start of the new school year for review. Review is not only crucial because students might have forgotten some of the content the learned before summer break, but it is also critical to determine precisely where students are. Plus, when teachers review essential content and ideas at the start of the new school year, students have a more uniform understanding of the ELA content. And that is all during a normal school year. Again, like last year, this current school year is nothing like a normal school year, and that is why it is so important to go back to the basics, teach the essentials, and really make sure that our students have a good foundation before we move forward. Essential ELA ReviewOne of the easiest ways to review quite a bit of essential ELA content at the beginning of the year is to stick with a review unit in your classroom. Recently, I created my Essential ELA Review Units to specifically address review in the secondary ELA classroom. My Essential ELA Review units include five weeks of daily ELA review in a bell-ringer format, and all of the units include a wide variety of essential ELA standards. From argument, informational and narrative writing to language skills to reading analysis and inference, these ELA Review units hit on all of the major ELA standards. With the Essential ELA Review Unit, students review content on the instructional slide and complete just a few exercises every single day for five weeks. I am currently using this program in my classroom with my sophomores, and it is helping me guide my instruction for the year. Currently, I have Essential ELA Review units available for grade 8 (which reviews the grade 7 standards), grades 9-10 (which reviews the grade 8 standards), and grades 11-12 (which reviews 9-10 standards). Grades 9-10 ELA Review ELA Review StationsAnother way to review important ELA content in the classroom is to set up review stations, and what’s so great about this activity is that you can tailor it to your class’ specific needs. One of the easiest ways to set up review stations is to use a combination of a computer-based program and task cards. For example, for one station, I might have students complete a grammar or punctuation review activity on their Chromebooks, and for the other stations, I might break up a set of task cards for students to work on. For a digital review station, my Digital Grammar Review Activities are a perfect fit for a digital review station. This teaching resource includes four mini-lessons: parallel structure, semicolons, hyphens, and colons. My Parts of Speech Task Cards and the Grammar Task Card Bundle are the perfect task cards for a review-stations activity!In an hour-long class period, I’ve found that review stations work best as either a one-day, three-station, or two-day five-station activity. Usually, I like to give each group of students about 15 minutes at each station. When planning for a station-type activity, I also plan to review the procedures at the beginning of the class. Then, at the end of the class, we review the content in a whole-group setting. Escape Room ReviewAnother fun way to review essential content in your classroom and also build classroom community is the same time is to group students into teams and have them compete in an escape room challenge. While I typically use escape rooms in the classroom as an end-of-the-unit review, escape rooms can also be beneficial as a stand-alone review activity to help your students remember information they’ve learned in previous years. In an escape room review activity, student groups will work together to solve a series of related tasks. While every student in the group might not have the answers or know the content, each group member will work together and pool their knowledge to solve the challenge. My favorite ELA escape room activities for review are my Elements of Fiction Escape Room and my Parts of Speech Escape Room. Parts of Speech Escape Room Gamifying Review ActivitiesIn addition to the review activities mentioned above, there are lots of fun, digital ways to gamify classroom review. If you are pressed for time or need to grab a review activity quickly, you can choose from one of the premade activities. From Kahoot! To Quizlet Live, the options are really endless, and it adds a sense of fun and excitement to the classroom. And, there is already user-generated content to choose from. If you are looking for more review activities, you’ll want to check out the short story collaborative review activity I have my students complete at the end of our short story unit. You’ll also want to check out this strategy to make any review activity an engaging experience. More Review Activities and Ideas: ELA Vocabulary Bundle
100 reading, writing, language, listening questions you'll see on ELA standardized tests aligned to the College & Career Ready Standards.
Do your students groan when you bring up the dreaded subject of grammar? Unfortunately, grammar instruction tends to be dry—but not if you have fun grammar exercises to engage your students! Middle schoolers can be a hard group to teach, but making grammar exercises fun keeps them focused on the task at hand. Fun Grammar
T minus six days till I need to report to school. Can you even?!?I know a lot of you are already back trying to maneuver in these very choppy waters.So, families in my district could
You know that collective sigh, the one that choruses around the room when you enthusiastically announce, "Class, the next unit we'll be entering into is poetry!" If poetry is taught the right way, students should be cheering at the thought of a Poetry Workshop day. Below I will outline the "why" of Poetry Workshop along with tips and tricks that I have picked up to make any poetry unit a raging success in your middle school classroom. If you like what you read below and want to implement a Poetry Workshop in your classroom, make sure you check out the Poetry Workshop resource available in my TpT store. This resource will walk you through every single step of implementing Poetry Workshop in your classroom, along with the assembly of a student Poetry Workshop binder that can be utilized across the entire school year. Lesson plans, graphic organizers, grading rubrics, and so much more awaits you in this comprehensive resource. Why Use Poetry Workshop? *It’s a change of pace. We immerse students so heavily into Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop day after day. It’s nice to have the option to mix things up a bit with Poetry Workshop. It is also a great transition between units. For instance, maybe you’ve just completed a three-week persuasive writing unit and you’re about to head into a round of literature circles. Take a day or two hiatus in between to do Poetry Workshop once the Poetry Workshop Kick-Off lessons are completed. Poetry Workshop can serve as a natural transition between the big, heavy units throughout the whole school year. *It will reach unexpected students. You may have a pretty good idea right away of who in your class excels at writing or can already read college-level material, but you may be surprised at which students soar while writing poetry. Poetry Workshop is a great way to hook in students who struggle or are unmotivated when it comes to reading and writing because it appears to be a manageable chunk. The thought of writing a five-paragraph essay or reading a 300-page book scares them half to death, but reading or writing a poem may not seem as scary. *It’s a great way to teach literary elements on a smaller scale. Sometimes it’s too daunting for students to come up with the theme of an entire book, but starting out teaching theme through poetry is the perfect scaffold before teaching theme in relation to a novel. The concept of theme will transfer perfectly between a poem and a book, but more students will understand the concept if you start teaching it through a poem all students understand and can easily read and reread. The same goes for teaching figurative language. Poetry is the perfect pathway to finding examples of figurative language and teaching them how to identify and use it. Point of view is also a great lens to look at poems through and teach students about through poetry. *It gets students to appreciate words and how words can evoke images. Poets have a gift for saying a lot with only a few words. It’s important that we’re teaching students how to be impactful writers in few words and make every word count. A poet keeps his/her audience in mind and thinks about what emotions he/she would like the reader to feel. Teaching-wise poetry allows so many pathways into teaching students about word choice, organization, sensory images, and audience awareness. *Poetry removes the need for perfect capitalization and punctuation. The poet gets to structure his/her poem how he/she wants to, and there is an art in playing around with punctuation and capitalization while writing a poem. Releasing this pressure of having to write “right” will allow students to write freely and openly. *A lot of times when we think about teaching poetry we think about having every student write a haiku, an “All About Me” poem, a name poem, a limerick, and then we call it good. Students publish a few poems, and we call it good for the year. This is not what Poetry Workshop is. Poetry Workshop gets students to read poems, analyze poems, consider techniques poets use that they would want to use, and write their own poems once they feel comfortable doing so. Teach students what poetry really is. As teachers, sometimes I think we’re afraid of poetry ourselves and then default into teaching poetry through a set of “form” poems. We hate it and are uncomfortable with it, so these views get passed right down to students. Let’s shift this attitude! Poetry can be a beautiful thing that teachers and students alike have a positive attitude about. Tips for Teaching with Poetry Workshop: Tip One: Teach Poetry in Phases I was first introduced to the idea of teaching poetry in phases when I read Fountas and Pinnell's book, Guiding Readers and Writers. Here's how I've taken the idea of phases and broken them down to work for my middle school students. Phase One: Collecting & Responding Have students read through poetry books or poetry websites, reading as many poems as they can. If they come upon a poem that they really enjoy or relate to, they can copy the poem down. I also like to have my students respond to the poems they write down in Phase One using prompts from the anchor chart below. Phase One exposes students to poetry in a non-threatening way. Students think about the poetry they enjoy. As they copy down poems, they also have to focus on how the poet structured the poem, what letters they capitalized, and how they punctuated it. Phase Two: Mimicking Techniques This is where it gets fun. Students now take techniques they've noticed other poets use and mimic these techniques to create poems of their own. Take a look at the anchor chart below to get an idea of the types of techniques students could mimic. Phase Three: Original Poetry Students can now create poetry of their own choosing. Give them the green light to let their creative spirits fly. Also discuss with them what they've learned from the first two phases that will help them as they create poetry. Check out the anchor chart below to see ideas for what makes a good poem. Tip Two: Whole Class Poetry Stalking I teach grammar in my classroom through pulling mentor sentences from our class interactive read aloud and have students "sentence stalk" the sentences by noticing everything the author did to construct that sentence. I transferred this concept into our poetry unit by having students notice everything they could about a particular poem as shown below. What has been great about poetry stalking is we have realized together words to use to describe poet's techniques. It has also been a great way to show that poetry has flexible rules for capitalization, punctuation, and poem structure. Not all poets construct their poems the same, but it's fun to infer why poets make the choices they do while writing poems. Check out this website for a great list of poems to use with middle school students while sentence stalking. Tip Three: Use Poetry Interactive Read Alouds There are so many great books out there written in verse. As you kick-off Poetry Workshop for the year with a poetry unit, consider doing a read aloud with one of the amazing book choices below to complement the work students are doing in Poetry Workshop. Tip Four: Teach New Types of Poetry Mix is up with your students by showing them poems different types of poems. Three of my favorites are below. Book Spine Poems: Give book boxes from your classroom library to students and have them create a book spine poem of their own. Blackout Poems: Copy off pages from several different books and make photocopies, allow students to select one, and then have them black out the words they don't want leaving the words they'd like to use to create a poem. Sandwich Poems: Students take the first and the last line from a poem they copied down during Collecting & Responding and write a poem filling in the middle. Tip Five: Make Everyone a Poet Show your students that everyone is and can be a poet, even you. Model the work you complete alongside your students during Poetry Workshop. Also, make sure you give plenty of time to have students share what they're doing in Poetry Workshop with one another.
Curriculum pacing can be the hardest part of teaching. Follow this guide and use these resources from ELA Buffet to help get your class on track!
Need more engagement from your middle school students? Try adding in one of these 3 ways to incorporate student choice into your classroom!
Teachers like starting the school year feeling well-prepared and confident. Read about 5 Strategies for a Solid Start to Your School Year
This blog post gives a list of five online platforms that can be used for distance learning or remote teaching in middle school or high school English Language Arts. These include platforms such as Flipgrid, Powtoon, Instagram, Commonsense.org. Storyboardthat, Canva, and others.
With so much content to cover in the middle school ELA and high school classroom, it can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. Here is a look at my favorite ELA
If you’ve ever found yourself searching the internet for “contemporary short stories” or “modern short stories” because you’re tired of teaching the same classic stories over and over again, I have THE HACK to change everything for you!
New year resolution essay is a short essay comprising of about 500 words. Do you know what is most important at the start of the new year?
After reading thousands of essays, quick writes, and classroom assignments throughout my teaching career, I’ve noticed a trend in student writing: students
Planning vocabulary activities that are meaningful and engaging can be challenging. Here are some ideas with a freebie to get started!
Are you using the Daily 5 framework for middle school ELA? The Daily 5 was a huge undertaking in my 6th grade classroom, so I want to share some tips and
From close reading to essay writing to vocabulary inspiration, these ELA posters are just the thing your classroom and students need.
This is a culmination of my own anchor charts, plus the best anchor charts that I could find online. This is a great place to find effective charts that get to the heart of what you are teaching in workshop. If you have a favorite chart that you'd like to add, please contact me! Also, if I have not properly given credit for an anchor chart, let me know so that I can fix it.
Teaching the elements of fiction doesn't have to be complicated or time-consuming. See how I break it down and teach through stations!
Reading a whole novel over the course of a few weeks can leave students drained and exhausted. By the time students complete the book and go to take the final exam or quiz over the book’s contents, they may have forgotten some essential elements. If this sounds familiar, you will love these novel review activities! Take the time to review each novel with your class before assigning the final test. When I plan my schedule, I usually have students take the test after they turn in their essays. Not only does this help students review, but it also gives me a class day to grade essays! Here are four critical topics to cover in your class novel review.
Teaching a narrative nonfiction unit in the upper elementary grades is so engaging with mentor texts and paired passages!
Are you looking for some fun ELA activities to make planning engaging ELA lesson plans a little easier? This list has you covered!
