Middle School English

Lists and lists of books and booktalks

Reading and writing workshops are instructional strategies as well as organizational frameworks for language arts instruction.

Reading and Writing Workshop webpage

Poetry Unit: cool unit with a lot of great ideas for performance assessments and learning activities

You and your partner have been selected to be guest editors for an anthology of poetry titled Poetry for Teens. As guest editors, you have been asked to submit five poems (total) for publication in the anthology.

Poetry Unit

One of the main goals of reading is to possess the ability to understand, or comprehend, what you have just read. A great strategy to help children comprehend text is to teach them how to summarize.

Create a Storyboard! A storyboard is a series of sketches that show the scene sequence of a media production.

film scripts galore!

Entire site devoted to the sound used in filmaking

Unit 1: Camera Angles, Movement and Composition Objectives Students will be able to identify and use camera angles, movement, and perspective. Students will be able to compose a well-balanced picture. Students will learn camera positions that will help them create a unique look that supports their story's point of view.

poetry forum

As teachers we need to adopt a very sensitive approach to the teaching of poetry, one that combines discussion and writing, one that examines ideas and feelings, one that encourages appreciation of the poetry of others while also giving room for our students to write freely when creating poetry. In this document I have tried to offer approaches to the teaching of writing poetry that can be used by all classroom teachers. Download a Word copy of this document here. These approaches encourage children to play around with words, to experiment with their sounds, their rhythm. They also allow the teacher to introduce new terminology in a fun way.

Introducing Poems This is a set of strategies to help students of all ages get to know and appreciate individual poems. As well as assisting students to make meaning from poems, the strategies help to develop an understanding of style. They also offer support for students' own poetry writing. Many of the strategies originally appeared in Approaches to Poetry, published by The Department of Education and TATE.

Targeting Text A Guided Writing Project Targeting Text was a collaborative project undertaken by teachers from a cluster of three schools in the Bowen District - Lindisfarne Primary, Lindisfarne North Primary and Cambridge Primary. The purpose of the project was to focus on the place of guided writing in a balanced writing program. Inspired and supported by Dr Jan Turbill of the University of Wollongong, the teachers were able to develop and share their own skills in using guided writing as a key teaching strategy.

Exploring poetry through film This activity is designed to enable students who have some understanding of film-technique to use this to develop and share interpretations of poetry.

Unit 3: Film Unit

Glossary of film terms