Teaching nonfiction can sometimes feel a little less exciting than diving into a great short story or novel. But nonfiction texts are everywhere, and helping students understand how those texts are organized is one of the most useful reading skills we can teach. One of the best places to start is with nonfiction text features. …
Teaching story elements in middle school may sound simple at first. After all, most students have been learning about characters, setting, and plot since elementary school. But in middle school, the goal changes. Students are no longer simply identifying who the characters are or where a story takes place. They need to begin analyzing how …
Walk into almost any middle school ELA classroom, and you will find students reading at very different levels. One student may finish a novel in two days. Another may struggle to get through a single page without support. Some students understand what they read but have difficulty writing about it. Others can decode the words …
Conflict is one of those literary elements that students usually understand long before they know the academic vocabulary for it. They recognize when two characters are fighting, when someone is struggling with a difficult decision, or when a character is trying to survive a dangerous situation. The challenge is helping students move beyond simply saying, …
Comparing two texts sounds simple enough—until students actually have to do it. Many middle school students can tell you what happens in Text A and what happens in Text B. The real challenge comes when they are asked to explain how the texts are similar, how they are different, and why those similarities and differences …
Test preparation season can create anxiety for both teachers and students. Teachers feel pressure to review an entire year’s worth of reading standards, while students may feel as though every class period has become another long practice test. Practice passages can help students prepare for standardized reading assessments, but only when they are used intentionally. …
Literature circles can transform reading from a quiet, independent activity into a meaningful conversation among students. When they are implemented effectively, literature circles give students opportunities to choose books, discuss ideas, support their thinking with evidence, and take greater responsibility for their learning. However, literature circles require more than placing students in groups and telling …
Have you ever told students to annotate a text only to watch them highlight nearly every sentence on the page? Maybe they circle random words, underline entire paragraphs, or write comments like “interesting” in the margins without explaining what they found interesting. Students are not born knowing how to annotate. Annotation is a skill that …
Teaching students to use text evidence can sometimes feel like teaching the same lesson over and over again. You ask students to support their answers, but they respond with: Middle school students often understand what they have read, but they do not always know how to prove their thinking. The problem is not necessarily reading …
Graphic organizers are one of the simplest and most effective tools teachers can use to support reading comprehension. Whether students are reading a short story, article, poem, novel excerpt, or nonfiction passage, graphic organizers help them slow down, organize their thinking, and make sense of what they read. For middle school students especially, reading can …
