How to Get Students to Elaborate When They Write

We have all been handed the one sentence answer.  Some students have a flow of ideas and effortlessly explain their thinking.  Others read a passage and have little to say about what they have read.
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What can we do?  Sentence starters are a huge help.  They get students to elaborate about their ideas and get the creative juices flowing.

They are like crutches.  After a student writes more and more, they will no longer need it.

Words to Describe the Tone of a Text

Tone is an author's attitude about a topic. There are several words that are used to describe the tone of a reading passage.  Use this free chart to describe the tone of a passage.

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Click Here For Tone Of A Passage Game Cards

Strategies to Boost Reading Scores

I am sorry, but I must say the phrase. Common Core.  For some students, the Common Core Assessment is no big deal. For others, it causes frustration.  This blog post provides classroom tested strategies that have boosted the reading performance of below and on-level students.  Even better, the strategies take very little extra preparation.

Strategy 1:
Expose students to extra reading passages, and discuss them for just five minutes a day. 

Benefits
Students build vocabulary knowledge and tackle harder text with extra support.

What to Use:
Daily Common Core Reading Passages or Short passages from magazines.  Organize magazine articles by topic.  Discuss them for a few minutes a day.  Over time, students begin to learn vocabulary words and learn how to tackle harder text.  This is what I did everyday until I created Daily Common Core Reading.

Strategy 2:
Teach thematically.  When I first began teaching, I mostly focused on skills.  Week one we worked on main idea, week two we worked on inferences, etc.  After further research on theme based teaching, I decided to give it a try.  It works!  Even my lowest performing students that had previously struggled for years made great leaps.  I still teach these topics, but I do it now in the context of  a theme such as animal adaptations, how societies or communities change over time, etc.

Strategy 3:
Assess students on how well they apply reading strategies.  Students must explain how a specific passage is connected to an overall theme.  They must explain how ideas in a passage advance the author's main idea or the plot.  Often, students know they should apply strategies, but they do not always consistently use them.

Strategy 4:
Read higher grade level text to students, and encourage them to read specific types of texts.  As soon as I began to read to students (even my older ones), I was able to make them into believers.  I highly encourage using high-interest quick text.  You can use these short high interest stories or read Goosebumps to lower grade level students, Gary Paulson stories to intermediate grade levels, and odd but true stories to middle school students.  Gradually, shift students to reading magazines such as National Geographic for Kids, (selected articles) from the Economist (middle school students), etc. Students have to gradually read more complex text in order to grow as readers.

Strategy 5:
Make use of those dead periods in the day to double dose instruction.  The first ten minutes of the school day, the beginning of a class period, and even the end of the school day are good.  I take those times to give students targeted extra practice at their own levels. This is especially helpful if you have students that do not do read at home.  The extra 15 minutes of targeted reading (with progress charts) adds up and really helps.  

Daily Common Core Reading Passages

Boost Common Core Reading Scores
Common Core Reading

Types of Fallacies in Writing

When some students are asked to explain whether or not an author has fully defended the ideas written in text, some students do not know what to say.  This chart will help.  It lists and describes the different types of fallacies that writers and speakers make.Click Here To Access This Freebie

Literature Choice Boards

I love choice boards so much.  Not only are they fun, but they also appeal to different learning styles.  I created this choice board to use with my middle school students.  The great thing about it is that choice boards can be used with any book.

How to use them:
After assigning a chapter for students to read, ask them to select an activity to complete from the list.  Since there are multiple activities to choose from, students can use the same choice board over and over again.

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100 Quick and Daily Grade 6 Daily Common Core Literature and Informational Text Passages

Common Core has just become easier.  This document contains 100 passages that align specially to the Grade 6 Literature and Informational Text Common Core Standards. Informational Text, literature, poetry, fantasy, folktales, plays, suspense stories and more are included.  Click Here For More Information

Benefits

• Review literature skills in between reading novels.  With Daily Common Core, students can review important literature skills and closely read text with quick, daily passages.
• Save time--The reading passages include school friendly themes that are taught in middle school literature such as self-acceptance, resolving conflict, and more.
• Monitor student progress.  The Common Core Standard is written next to each question to make student and teacher progress monitoring easy.  A weekly checklist at the end of each week lists the Common Core skills that were covered.
• Expose students to a variety of genres. The passages include realistic fiction, informational text, poetry, historical fiction, and YA fiction.

The Common Core Standard is written right next to each question to make progress monitoring easier.  This is a great way to quickly review figurative language, inferences, character traits, and more.  Click Here For More Information

Compare and Contrast Themes

There are several elements of a text that a student must pay attention to as they read. Theme is one of them.  Theme is addressed in two of the Common Core Standards. Standard RL.2 asks students to determine the theme of a text.  Standard RL.9 asks students to compare and contrast how authors convey theme.

One way to help students in this area is to have students closely read a text to look for ways than two different authors teach the same theme.  The setting, characterization, and also the choice of characters that an author includes in a text each contribute to helping readers determine what the theme of a text is.