Middle School English

From Writing Fix: Writing About Reading: Summarizing (not Plagiarizing!)

Summarizing can be highly effective for helping students identify main ideas, generalize, remove redundancy, integrate ideas, and improve memory for what is read. It is especially worthwhile when used with other strategies such as generating questions and answering questions (NRP, 2000). Although sometimes considered similar to synthesizing, it is important to note that summarizing is more of a part of synthesizing. While creating a synthesis lends itself toward the achievement of creating a new perspective or thought out of what one is reading, summarizing provides more of an opportunity to understand and restate the text (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000).

When best-selling author James Patterson noticed a few years ago that his 10-year-old son was losing interest in reading, he decided to do something about it. First he started writing books for young readers. Just recently, he launched a new website, ReadKiddoRead.com devoted to helping youngsters develop a love of reading.

Bring poetry to life in your school! These pages are specially designed to help you and your students to get the most out of the Poetry Archive. There are lesson plans and activities for all key stages and for the inclusive classroom. Poetry can enrich other areas of the curriculum too; there are ideas here for History teachers, and we will be adding material for other subject areas in the coming months. This is a growing, developing resource, so come back and visit regularly to see what's new. Our plans include a forum for teachers to discuss their experiences, as well as a space where you will be able to create your own teaching materials and share them with colleagues.

Here are a number of creative and inexpensive suggestions for making poetry a more important part of school life during April and throughout the year.

Poetic Forms & Techniques

Great Poems to Teach Compiled by the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, this list contains 341 poems submitted by teachers who participated in a workshop organized by TWC. Selected for participation by C. K. Williams, teachers applying to the workshop were asked to supply a list of poems which they had successfully taught in high school English and Language Arts classrooms.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF 6 traits RELATED WEBSITES

SIX + 1 TRAITS WRITING

How can you help students find meaning in informational texts and become independent strategic readers and thinkers? Nonfiction Reading Power gives teachers a wealth of effective strategies for helping students think while they read material in all subject areas. Using the best children's books to motivate students, Adrienne Gear shows teachers how help students zoom-in, question and infer; find the main idea, make connections, and transform what's on the printed page. Key introductory concept lessons for each of the five reading powers provide valuable insight into the purpose of each strategy. The book also explores the particular features of nonfiction and offers lists of key books organized around strategies and subject areas.

Grades 6-8 Lessons from Read Write Think

Welcome to Kenn Nesbitt's poetry playground, Poetry4kids.com, where you will find lots of funny poems and poetry books for children, games, contests, lessons, discussion forums, and journals, plus a rhyming dictionary, funny poetry podcast, school visit information and lots more.

Poetry Sites

Unit 1: Poetry

Personification Lesson

This is a collection of reviews of great books for kids, ideas of ways to use them in the classroom and collections of books and activities about particular subjects, curriculum areas, themes and professional topics.