Spring is in the air, and school children all across the nation are entering the last leg of the academic year. But before the final bell rings, many students will take end-of-year state assessments designed to gauge their academic aptitude and growth. For several children, just the idea of testing...
The best part of being an ELA teacher is getting to expose students to a diverse set of stories. To appreciate the new cultures and heritages more sincerely in a book, students have to start the book feeling like they understand or can relate to something with the characters with whom they spend...
I don’t know about you, but I hate grading reading comprehension questions. First of all, the answers usually could be “borrowed” from websites like LitCharts or Spark Notes so they don’t actually tell you if the students read or not. Secondly, just because a student can tell you what happened in a...
When I think about the success stories of my middle school emergent bilingual learners, I can’t help but smile. What about you? Sure, there were challenges – my challenges in providing instruction, theirs in learning. But the joy of overcoming those challenges is worth all the clouds in the sky.
This blog entry is designed to provide some hints to help your students improve their writing on the free-response section of the exam. The expectations, instruction, and instruction that teachers provide students related to FRQ writing is extremely important and will dramatically impact student...
Dynamic and flat characterization has been in language arts and English curricula forever, it seems. How do we up the rigor as students advance in secondary classrooms? I find a helpful graphic organizer gives students a perspective on which character is dynamic and which just isn’t. During Women’s...
Analyzing complex characters in a novel or a short story requires students to look at many things such as how they’re described physically, but also their motivations for their actions and events that happen, their reaction to external factors, and the relationships they have.
This lesson aims to show teachers and students how to develop a historical argument using Documents Based AP History (DBQ) documents. We will use developed paragraphs written to answer the APWH Modern 2019 (Portuguese in the Indian Ocean DBQ) to show students and teachers how corroboration,...
In this lesson, students will choose pages from a scene from an assigned novel (this can be done with a shorter text, too). Students will start by choosing significant dialogue and writing in the middle of a blank page (included in the template). They will reflect on the context of the quote and...
Do you ever have one of those days where you ponder, “What on Earth am I doing, and am I doing it right???” I did. Often. And they were often accompanied by tears and the heavy consumption of caffeinated beverages to get me through the day. Teaching English to middle school learners who are also...
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