“Why do I have to read aloud? I hate reading aloud!” This reaction from a struggling 6th grade reader usually has less to do with hating read-aloud time and more to do with reading fluency. A number of years ago, when my school district began our …
As a middle school teacher, I find that all of my classes have a wide range of exposure to grammar fundamentals. Students come in with vastly different levels of grammar knowledge, and many concepts need more than a quick mini-lesson to stick. This makes it …
If you haven’t added an ELA word wall to your classroom yet, definitely do it today! It is the easiest way to transform classroom wall space into a perpetual learning resource. Word walls have been a staple of my classroom for many years, and I’m …
Rules by Cynthia Lord is a novel that will make students genuinely think about how they treat people. I have watched many middle schoolers connect with this book, make arguments about what Catherine should have done, and then change their minds by the end. That …
Red Kayak by Priscilla Cummings is a staple in my 7th-grade ELA curriculum. This is a book we cover through both traditional novel study activities and daily read-alouds in the classroom. It is fast-paced, the moral stakes are real, and your students will be talking …
In this post, I’m sharing the five components I use in every novel unit, plus a free character trading card template you can download and use with any book. But first, a quote many teachers can relate to… “A writer only begins a book, a …
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