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 …
Making inferences is one of those reading skills that sounds simple until students actually have to do it. We tell them, “Read between the lines,” but many students do not really know what that means. Some guess randomly. Some copy a sentence from the text and call it an inference. Others wait for the author …
Differentiating reading instruction sounds wonderful in theory, but in real life, it can feel overwhelming. You have students reading above grade level, students who struggle to decode, students who can read the words but miss the meaning, students who need language support, and students who would rather do almost anything besides read. And somehow, they …
Introduction One of the biggest challenges in middle school ELA is getting students to use text evidence well. Many students can find a quote from the text, but they struggle to choose the best evidence, introduce it smoothly, or explain how it supports their answer. As teachers, we often see responses like this: The character …
Teaching ELA with Limited Time Can Feel Impossible Teaching middle school ELA often feels like trying to fit an entire library into a lunchbox. You are expected to teach reading comprehension, writing, grammar, vocabulary, discussion, research, test prep, speaking and listening, digital literacy, and sometimes intervention skills too. Add in assemblies, testing windows, shortened schedules, …
