#MiddleSchool

Drop that stack of essays. We have teaching to do!

If you're looking to unbury yourself from the paperwork, then this site is for you. Here, our mission is simple: Come together as a group of English teachers to come up with high impact, innovative, and empowering lessons that not only bring energy to our classrooms, but also save us a little grading and planning time. Let's do this English teacher thing together!

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4 min

3 Reasons Students Should Learn Writing from Authors

When I started a blog, the first thing I did was scour the Internet for the best blogs and study them. I looked at titles, leads, hooks, development, and closings. My first instinct as a writer was to attempt to stand side by side with some of the best and learn from them. The best writers our students encounter almost every day are authors. Our job as teachers is to help our students to start looking at their reading not just as an escape or as a text that will help them bui

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6 min

ELA Escape Room

Today my students participated in our first-ever escape room. It. was. amazing. I think it's always a good sign when students are on their feet reading, leaning over a passage, and verbally thinking through text based questions. Not only did the students have a blast, they learned more about close reading and multiple choice than I could have ever taught them in a traditional lecture-style lesson. In an escape room, students are truly doing the work of learning. They are unp

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5 min

Standards Based Grading for Independent Reading

Two years ago I changed my grading practices from the traditional 0-100 scale model to Standards Based Grading (SBG). Making this change forced me to reevaluate how I measured my students' independent reading skills. Standards Based Grading finally gave me the perfect balance between encouraging a love of literature through independent reading and using independent reading as a tool for building literacy skills. The first step in switching over to SBG was asking myself, wha

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3 min

Teaching the Power of Literature through Songs, Poetry, and Independent Reading

Show students the power of literature in our lives: the power to make us think, to make us feel, to make us look at the world in a whole new way. The power of literature is the reason why we read, and teaching students that power creates lifelong readers. Last week I introduced my students to our newest independent reading study: stories and poems with enduring power. Using task cards, students walked around the classroom visiting four different stations where they brainstorm

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2 min

Teaching Kids to Evaluate Internet Sources

What is real news and what is fake news has everyone from our president to our families at the Thanksgiving table talking, and this year as my students began their first research project, I knew that I could use current events to maximize the engagement and authenticity of their study of evaluating Internet sources. I started preparing by gathering as many fake news stories as possible. I tried to find articles that avoided politics because I did not want my middle schoolers

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2 min

Celebrating March Madness with Poetry Brackets

Let's face it: getting kids excited about poetry can be a challenge. However, it's not at all impossible. Last year was my first year using poetry brackets during the month of March, and it was a hit. I gave kids a "Sweet Sixteen" of poets, had them find and research poems by each poet, predict winners, and then we voted on our favorites using Google Forms, advancing poets accordingly. The most rewarding part was hearing students throwing around poet's names like they were t

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