Category Archives: language arts lessons

Literary Response One-Pager Activity

IMG_3793

I was going to save this post until August when I had been properly AVID-trained, but I get so many questions about these One-Pagers on Instagram! They turned out so beautifully, and it’s such an easy strategy that I think we can all implement it with or without the full training.

A Literary Response One-Pager is an AVID summarizing strategy in which students use evidence from the text as well as graphics to convey the overall idea or theme of a story. It’s a very versatile strategy, and I’ve seen teachers use it in history and science classes as well. My co-worker had her class do this assignment for The Diary of Anne Frank and I loved how hers turned out, so I used the same strategy. I came up with my own instructions and posted them on Google Classroom for my students to refer to.

Literary Response One Pager

(I use LucidPress to create most of my digital flyers instructions, and the flat lay graphic is from Laine Sutherland Designs on TeachersPayTeachers).

The examples here are from my 8th grade English class, using the Anne Frank play from the HMH Collections Curriculum. We had engaged in so many discussions while reading the play, and my students had written so many shorter, focused writing pieces, that I didn’t want to assign another long essay at the end of this text. But because Anne Frank’s story is so powerful and so profound, especially to readers who are her same age, I knew we needed a reflection piece.

IMG_3803

Before we started working on these One-Pagers we talked about tone. Color choices would reflect students’ understanding of the tone of the story, and would allow them to express their interpretations of the story. I love using Flocabulary’s video and resources on Tone & Mood to introduce this topic.

Similarly, the excerpts that students chose to use from the story also demonstrated both their understanding of the main ideas and theme, and allowed them to choose the sections that they connected with the most. I love when an assignment offers choices to students, but also keeps them focused on a specific task.

IMG_3795

Clearly, the graphics on these projects are stunning! We have an amazing art program at our school, and I also just happened to have a class full of some of the most artistically talented students I’ve ever met. I also love that calligraphy/hand-lettering is kind of a thing again, and these students like to make all of their hand-written assignments look extra amazing. It isn’t necessary that all of your students have professional drawing skills in order to do One-Pagers, but it is nice if they put a little bit of effort into the details of their graphics. These girls (yes, they were all girls), looked up what the actual cover of Anne’s diary looked like, and they studied pictures of her to make sure that their drawings were accurate. I gave them two days of class time to complete this assignment, but the students who did these examples took them home to complete and spent extra time and effort.

IMG_3797

The “Personal Response” section is always my favorite to read. Ideally the response will be connected to the quotes that the students chose to emphasize from the story. They can comment upon these quotes, make connections between them or to a larger topic, or provide their interpretation of the text. This is great with a long text like the Anne Frank play, but it also helps students to think more deeply about short stories. I haven’t used this strategy with poetry yet, but I have a feeling it would lead to some outstanding projects, and I’m definitely going to try it next year.

IMG_3799

One requirement that instantly improves the quality of everyone’s project is banning white space. (“Fine, except for clouds and eyeballs,” I always end up saying). It forces students to think about the background of their scene, or fill in blank areas with items or symbols from the story. I tell them to add a border if they don’t know where else to start. This also helps to emphasize mood and tone since students have to make decisions about color choices and cannot just leave blank space. We are not Taylor Swift here.

IMG_3800

My students know that I am not a fan of pencils (I always use pens!), and in my class, pencils are for practice. A project in pencil is not complete, it’s just a rough draft. For One-Pagers, students need to go over pencil in pen or marker or crayon or whatever other tool they’d like to use. When students show me their work and it’s just a few things written or drawn in pencil I say, “Oh that’s a good rough draft, I can’t wait to see how it turns out when you finish it!” I spend a lot of my own money and time acquiring plenty of art supplies for students to use because I really value good tools to help students produce work that looks high-quality and that they can be proud of.

IMG_3801

I was so impressed with the effort and thoughtfulness my students put into this assignment, and I’m so glad that they have inspired so many teachers to use this strategy as well. I’m looking forward to participating in the full AVID training in August, and I’ll be sure to update you on other effective strategies that I incorporate into my class. Be sure to tag me on Instagram if your students create their own One-Pagers. I’d love to see them!

How to Help Your Students Improve Their Writing

improve writing

The editing process was not my favorite thing to teach middle schoolers. It was a struggle to pull a rough draft out of many of them, and then going through another lesson on editing at the end of a project used to feel like too much. I couldn’t possibly give all of my students in all of my classes sufficient feedback, and often, when they peer edited (even in guided stations), I wasn’t sure that they were truly receiving useful or applicable critiques.

Enter Newsela. I’ve used Newsela for a long time now as a reading resource. It’s great because each article is rewritten at various lexile levels, so it provides access to information for all of your students. I’d often assign the same article to a class, and then walk around the room as they read on their Chromebooks, noting the difference in vocabulary, syntax and structure between the different level of articles.

I decided to use this feature to help my students analyze and improve their own writing. I chose a high-interest, current article from Newsela (which are easy to find!), and had my students read this article at the lowest reading level, usually around the 2nd grade mark. We summarized the article and noted the length of the sentences, the vocabulary used, etc.

Then I raised the lexile level of the article up a few hundred points. We re-read the article and noted that now, the sentences were more complex, some of the vocabulary words were more sophisticated, and the author included more details in each paragraph.

Finally, we read the article at the maximum reading level and again noted the differences. I had my students choose any other article they would like to read on the site and repeat the same activity, observing the changes as the lexile level increased. I asked them to observe 3-5 specific improvements in the article, and then apply those improvements to their own writing project.

Before we tried this activity, my students would always default to vocabulary as a way to improve their writing. They would simply plug each word into a thesaurus, pick the word that sounded the most complicated, and shove that word back into their essay. Often, the connotation no longer fit the purpose of their essay, and the tone would become clunky and indirect.

I realized, however, that this was really the only strategy they had been taught to improve their writing. I’m a big fan of mentor texts and giving students as many concrete examples of good writing as I possibly can, but I tended to only use these as a jumping off point for writing projects. I see now that they are perfect resources for editing, and I no longer dread the editing phase of my students’ writing projects.

Here is a more thorough example of the kind of lesson I did with my students:

 

how to teach “farewell to manzanar”

Teaching Farewell to Manzanar was my favorite part of this school year. It was challenging, fulfilling, entertaining, and I honestly think my students are better people after reading this book. Taking on a novel for the first time can be really intimidating, though, so if you haven’t taught the book before, here are a few of my tips. Let me know how it turns out for you!

favorite book foldable

favfold8

The most popular books with my 6th graders this year were YA novels that became movies (Divergent, Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, etc).  This is probably partly because those books got so much publicity (plus they are awesome).  My students usually don’t think to ask their friends or teachers for good book recommendations, so I created a project where my kids broke down the elements of their favorite books and practiced sharing their favorites with the class.

My favorite novel is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.  It is a quirky, laugh-out-loud funny, off-beat type of book that I picked up during my freshman year of college after a recommendation from my friend Lauren.  (See how useful recommending books can be?).  I based my example off of this novel.

I cut construction paper in half length-wise, and then made all the foldables myself while my students were taking their finals.  (This was a last week of school activity).  Here is a video on how to make the blank foldables:

favfold1

I’m not a great artist, but I copied an element of the cover of the actual book and did my best to match the font.  I required my students to draw cover art as well.

favfold2

I wanted the Setting tab at the top because that is the smallest tab to write on.  I listed each category in order by how much room students would need to adequately explain that element of the story.  (P.S. My writing is quite crude and simple in each of these examples so that it could serve as a realistic 6th grade model).

favfold4

The conflict is where I wanted my students to draw other people in.  They needed to explain enough about the story to get readers interested, without giving away the resolution.  The crazier the details about the story, the better!

favfold5

This is generally the hardest section for students to complete, but theme is something that we have been working on identifying all year, so it also served as a bit of a cumulative assessment.  I remind them to consider the question, What does this book say about how life works?

favfold6

There is really only enough room here to list two to three characters.  I asked students to just list the characters and then give a brief, but colorful description of each one.

favfold7

As with the conflict section, the summary should leave readers interested in finding out more about the story.  There is no need for elaborate explanations.  Students should simply try to hook other students into wanting to read the full book.

And there you go!  This project took two class periods, lots of construction paper, and my big box of colored pencils.  I made the blank foldables, and I told students to bring copies of their favorite book from this school year.  I kept the completed projects, so I am going to make a display board at the beginning of the school year so that my new students will have plenty of book recommendations at their fingertips.

As they worked, I also played this YouTube video by BooksAndQuills to encourage my students to seek out book recommendations and discover new books.

grammar wednesdays

Image

This is my first year teaching English, so back in August, I was looking for all the help I could get.  Structuring my curriculum for the year was a challenge compared to my History classes (which pretty much just progress chronologically).  Even though I had a district pacing guide for my English classes, I was a little overwhelmed with the task of trying to fit all of the content into one year in an organized and logical fashion.

I’m actually still trying to nail this down, but one structural decision has really helped me this year.  On Wednesdays we get out of school about an hour earlier than usual, so each class period is a little shorter.  (Well, the students get out early.  The teachers have to stay for professional development).  I decided to make those days Grammar Wednesdays.  I had a feeling I might get swept up in all the stories and worksheets and essays, and forget to cover the basics.  Many of my students speak another language (which they usually cannot write), and they’re only, you know, like eleven, so grammar lessons are very important for them.

Most people probably hated grammar lessons as a kid, but let me tell you, my students LOVE Grammar Wednesdays.  I wish I could take credit for that, but it’s really because they love the videos on Flocabulary.com.

Flocabulary.com is an educational website that uses hip hop songs and videos to teach content.  I use the grammar videos most often, but I’ve also used a few of their US History videos.  Here is a screen shot from my account on my iPad so that you can see all the subjects Flocabulary covers:

Image

I go to Language Arts and then choose from the grammar videos.  Here is another screen shot of a few video options:

Image

The videos also come with tests in pdf format, so you can quiz your students to assess what they learned.  Usually, I will let my students watch the video once through, without any worksheet or anything to distract them from the song.  The songs are really catchy, so usually after that first run-through they can sing most of the chorus already.  Then I hand out the test and just let them work on it while I play the video a few more times.  Some students fill it in right away and then just dance in their seat to the video, and others have to really pay attention to the video until the answer they are looking for comes up.  We go over the answers together after that, to make sure that each student has all the correct answers.

Since I make sure that everyone has 100% of the correct answers, I don’t really grade this assignment.  I just 3-hole punch their worksheets, and they have to keep all their grammar worksheets in their binder.  At the end of each quarter, I give a grammar “final,” using questions from Flocabulary.  We take a day or two at the end of the quarter to go over and study all of the grammar worksheets to prepare for the final.

The first video I ever showed was the “Back to the Roots” song on root words.  I was just kind of testing out the website and trying to decide if I liked it.  When I played that song my 6th graders literally got up out of their desks and started, like, getting hyphy to the music.  I had no idea they would like it so much!  I told them, “This is just a sample.  There are actually quite a few other songs that I like better.”

One kid said, “I don’t know how it could get any better than this!”

And isn’t that what you want to hear everyday?  😉

Plus, that content is so stuck in their heads that they couldn’t get it out if they tried.  Ask any of my students what the parts of speech are and they will rock side to side and sing, “Noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunctions, interjec-TION!”

Here’s the kicker: you do have to pay for the service.  I pay $7 a month for my personal account, but if your school or district signs up, the prices are a little different.  $7 seems like kind of a lot when you multiply that every month, but for me, it’s worth the time that I save planning grammar lessons and making grammar worksheets every week.  Plus, nothing that I could come up with would be nearly as entertaining as the hip hop videos.  If my students are good during the lesson (which the always are), then I turn it up and play it one more time at the very end of class and let them dance around and sing to it.  They’ve had full-on dance battles while simultaneously singing about grammar.  To me, that’s $7 well spent.

And just to please all of the Common Core junkies, here is a link to the 6th Grade Conventions of Standard English Common Core standards.  We are hitting them out of the park.  You’re welcome! 🙂

#summarize

piclab

This is my first year teaching English, and I have found that one really difficult skill to teach is summarizing.  My students nod and say that they understand, but when it comes down to it, they struggle (and come up with some crazy ideas, way out of left field!).

Well, Facebook recently implemented hashtags into its format (oh man, that is going to date this post for all eternity, isn’t it?).  I’m not much of a “hashtagger” myself, but one day I was trying to think of hashtags to tack on to a status update, and it was really hard!  As I came up with a few really lame words and phrases, however, I had an epiphany: I was really just identifying key words and summarizing my post.  I thought, I’ll bet my students do this on Twitter and Facebook all the time.  They’re probably way better at it than I am!

So I decided to design a lesson where they could use their hashtagging skills to identify key words and themes in literature.  Since I’m sure not all of my students are Twitter fiends, I began the lesson with this very informative video about hashtags by Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake:

(Don’t worry, I ended the video right before Questlove walks in).

According to my pacing guide, we were supposed to read a story from our literature book called “Everybody is Different, but the Same Too.”  I created a worksheet to go with the story that incorporated hashtags (instead of writing down key words or phrases) to summarize each paragraph.

summarize

#summarize     click here for pdf file

My English students really like to read out loud, so a different student read each paragraph, and we added hashtags after each one.  I modeled the first one, and the students caught on pretty quickly.  Their hashtags were much closer to actual summaries than other assignments had been where I just asked them to summarize.  We then connected their summaries to the overall theme of the story, and I’ll share that activity in a separate post.

Warning: I did kind of create a monster with the whole hashtag thing, and for the next few days, they added the word “hastag” to everything.  

“Hashtag-hi Mrs. Forbes!”

“Hashtag-can I please go to the bathroom?”

“Hashtag-what is the homework?”

“Hashtag-have a good weekend!”

As annoying as you might think hashtags are in Twitter-form, they’re much worse in spoken word!  But this ended up being a really fun way to break down a story, and the kids keep asking to do it again.  Using hashtags taps into their background knowledge and allows them to apply elements of their outside lives to school.  Plus, they gave me much more accurate summaries of the story than I had ever gotten before.  #winwin

happy national handwriting day! (jan 23)

Image

Happy (late) National Handwriting Day, everyone!  I have always loved anything to do with handwriting: keeping journals, writing notes in class, making lists, having pen pals, filling out forms, sending people birthday cards, you name it.  Even now, I keep track of my schedule in a planner that I take with me everywhere.  Sure, I have an iPad and an iPhone with brilliant apps that could organize everything for me–but I wouldn’t get to write everything down!

Image

Also, since 9th grade I have only used one kind of pen: black, fine point, Pentel RSVP pens.  Nothing else will do.  I’m very stingy with my pens, too.  I will watch you like a hawk until that pen is safely back in my pen pouch in my purse!

My husband recently bought me a Kindle Paperwhite to help me avoid the back and neck problems inflicted upon me by the 20-30 books I have to read each semester for my Masters program, but again, I need to write in the margins.  (I love the Kindle for pleasure reading, but when I am analyzing a text, I have to engage with it using an RSVP pen).

Image

You know what else is kind of strange about handwriting?  Mine is almost identical to my mom’s, and hers is almost identical to my grandma’s.  My best friend since 7th grade (Rochelle) and I also have incredibly similar writing.  Both of us have been confused when receiving Christmas cards from each other in the mail–Did this get sent back?  Did I have the wrong address?  Oh, ha ha, that’s not my writing after all!  Is handwriting hereditary, or do we copy what we see?

Anyway, I am always very excited for National Handwriting Day, and this year we celebrated it in my English class.  Sixth graders are never excited to hear the word “cursive,” but I opened their eyes to a whole new concept this year.  “You’re not in elementary school anymore,” I reminded them, “so now you can write however you want!  You can do loops on your y’s and g’s this week, and then hearts on top of your i’s next week, you can write in half cursive-half printing–the sky is the limit!”  I just wanted them to practice neat penmanship, and to have fun doing it.

We started off by writing the alphabet in whatever handwriting they liked best.  I encouraged them to develop their own signature style (no pun intended).  Then we wrote out some panagrams like,

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog  and

My grandfather picks up quartz and valuable onyx jewels.

(Panagrams are coherent sentences that include every letter of the alphabet).

Next, they practiced writing their signature, or autograph.  You would be shocked at how many of my 8th graders cannot write their names in cursive.  Like, no matter how many different ways I explained it, I still got their name written in printing.  It was nuts.  So with my 6th graders, I want to make sure that they practice writing their signature at least once a year.  If they get that MLB contract one day, they are going to need to know how to do this!

Students had the option to continue to observe National Handwriting Day by completing an extra credit assignment that was due the next day.  They could either make up their own panagram (it’s actually REALLY hard!), or hand-write a letter to someone on stationary.  The art of letter writing is pretty close to extinct, so I am doing my part to bribe students into reviving it.  Here is what one class brought back the next day:

Image

Really, they didn’t have to write the letter to me, but hey, they’re smart!  How can I not give you a bunch of extra credit if you hand-write all the reasons why I am amazing onto a cute card?  I also liked the homemade stationary (which they probably made ten minutes before the bell rang from their binder paper and a pen they found at the bottom of someone’s backpack, but whatever).

Side note: I have heard that many states are dropping cursive from their Common Core curriculum (California is keeping it, though).  This is a shame, because I have read in a few articles that the act of connecting one letter to the next requires the brain to think one step ahead, and makes writing in cursive a fundamentally different task from printing.  Experts also argue that cursive is useful to know for note-taking, although I would guess that most students will be typing their notes in the future anyway.

Still, I enjoy handwriting, and I love to read at beautiful script.  I am going to continue to celebrate National Handwriting Day every January 23rd, and I hope that you do too!  What other ideas do you have for NHD activities?

spelling bee word wall

Image

The school spelling bee is tomorrow!  I’ve trained my 6th graders well, and I’m certain that one of my students will win!  We started learning the words on the Scripps National Spelling Bee word list by creating signs with one spelling word and the definition.  Each student made a colorful sign with the word, its definition, and artwork that represented the word.  They taught each other how to spell the words, and practiced spelling their word in front of the class (“say, spell, say!”).  I needed something to block the morning sun from my 1st period class’s eyes anyway, so we made a Word Wall from all the spelling words.  Students try to incorporate the spelling words into their comments as much as possible (“mugwump” gets a lot of action), and even if their eyes are wandering every so often, at least they will probably rest on our colorful Word Wall eventually.  I can’t wait for the competition tomorrow! 🙂