Middle School English

"Middle School Collections"

Using the New Middle School ELA Classroom Library Collections

Laura Robb Classroom Library Collection

FANBOYS

"The canary flew out of the window. The canary was yellow."

LANGUAGE ARTS Articles, E-Mail and Web Links about Language Arts

Free online books library--Great site!

Classroom Strategies Explicit strategy instruction is at the core of good comprehension instruction. "Before" strategies activate students' prior knowledge and set a purpose for reading. "During" strategies help students make connections, monitor their understanding, generate questions, and stay focused. "After" strategies provide students an opportunity to summarize, question, reflect, discuss, and respond to text. Teachers should help students to understand why a strategy is useful, how it is used, and when it is appropriate. Teacher demonstration and modeling are critical factors for success, and student discussion following strategy instruction is also helpful. The most frequently researched strategies can be applied across content areas; other content-area specific strategies are emerging, and we will include them here in the future.

Poetry Foundation Learning Lab

"How to Create a Realistic Fiction Character" Recommended by Stevi for unit 3: Realistic Fiction

"Flash Fiction: a complete story in one thousand or fewer words." One of the sites recommended by Stevi Quate for use in unit 3: Realistic Fiction

"This protocol to discuss student work was created to help grade level teams reflect on their definitions of proficient work on specified assignments or assessments and to reach consensus on what constitutes a proficient response as well as to diagnose the student performance in relation to proficiency to inform instruction. Each teacher will be asked to bring three samples of student work from the same assignment or assessment: a student response from one of the top 5 students in the class, a response from one of the middle ten students in the class and a response from one of the bottom 10 students in the class."