Whether or not school was in session, I always found that the lessons embedded in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches were invaluable mentor texts for teaching writing and inspiring young people. My last year in the classroom, I was particularly moved by a tweet from Julia E. Torres, a librarian, educator, and activist, in which she shared a conversation she overheard:

“Just overheard a child in the hallway on the phone, ‘We are watching MLK videos again because you know they can neeeeever teach us anything new.’ This was a middle school student. Let’s think about that…”

That gave me pause. How often did I see my colleagues relying on MLK videos, or worse, skipping over this day entirely? How often had I felt like I couldn’t carve out the time to honor his legacy? I knew I needed to take the lesson of teaching dreams to a new level. I wanted my students to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. not just as a figure in history, but as an author to imitate and admire. His speeches made people listen to the issues that mattered. And no matter how pressured we feel to move through the curriculum, some lessons are simply more important.

On that day, it mattered. I reflected on how I could integrate Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech into our mentor text work. The lesson wouldn’t take the entire hour, but my goal was clear: I wanted my students to notice the craft of his writing—specifically his use of repetition, metaphors, and the cadence of his voice—and then have them write about their own dreams in a similar way.

This post outlines the three-step process I used to teach his speech as a mentor text and offers further activities to extend the lesson.

Narrative writing is always the first big unit taught in sixth-grade English, but I would also argue that narrative writing is the perfect way to open up a brand new school year because we are finding out about our students’ stories. I am also pretty sure that October may be one of the toughest months to teach in considering that it consists of conferences, the end of the first marking period for my middle school, the flu season that starts circulating, and it is my birthday month. The last part is not a bad thing, I just find it easier to resent less “me time” with all of the to-do lists piling up. This post contains step-by-step directions for teaching a personal narrative writing unit at the secondary level. This includes directions, elements of the assignment, teaching strategies, and mentor texts. I also wanted to include information about writing conferences and grading information.

Reading and writing are all too often cyclical. Everyone knows good reading fuels good writing and vice versa. As a middle school teacher, I really wish that I was able to teach reading and writing separately or even give them their own block of time, but I do also love the impossible harmony that is being a reading AND writing teacher. This post will explain how I start my week with students, and how I often will start each class. I always start each hour the first day of the week with a book talk about a middle grade or young adult novel or nonfiction book. It kicks off my mentor text work with kids, and it gets them excited about a book they may or may not have heard about before. This post goes into detail to explain why the simple act of talking about books in a way that makes kids want to read them is one of the most important things we can do as teachers each day.

For many years, I lived in the school of thought that my middle-school students wouldn’t want to read picture books. As with many things in teaching, we don’t know until we know. I love reading aloud to my students, and naturally, they love it because reading aloud goes back to a time when they loved reading as young children. As I could spend a lengthy bit of time here on this post about the apparent lack of love of reading that my sixth-graders come into my classroom with every fall, I will l quote Pernille Ripp from #NerdCampMI: “My goal is to make them dislike reading less.” Reading aloud to my students starts to work on this mission. The power of the read-aloud is equivalent to the power of the book talk. When kids hear stories and your recommendations for stories enough, they start to listen. Colby Sharp, a 5th-grade teacher in Parma, Mi, said this past week, “This year the picture book read aloud is as close to normal as anything we are doing in my classroom. The energy in the room is electric and I feed off it” (@colbysharp). This post contains 15 books that will spark electricity with words and stories.

If I were in my classroom’s physical space, I would plan to read one picture book aloud to my students each week. Now that I am virtual teaching, I plan at least 3-4 picture book read-alouds a week. One of my reflections from the 2018-2019 school year was that I loved how I felt solid with my growth in my independent reading program and my mentor text work, but I felt like I needed to be a driving force behind building empathy and compassion through both of these works. Empathy and reading were my two goals for 2019-2020, and they remain my two priorities in online learning. Reading aloud helps build not only a reading community but empathy and compassion in the form of community listening.

Whether you call quick writes your warmup, a focused writing prompt, writing into the day, or simply timed writing, a quick write has a range of possibilities that are just plain cool and useful in the English classroom. I adhere to the definition that Linda Reif uses in her book The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students' Thinking and Writing: “A quick write is a first draft response to a short piece of writing…” (3). Linda Reif uses other authors’ writing to spark ideas, but in my opinion, it can also be in the form of a question or another prompt to get students thinking. The three-minute quick write as a strategy is not new. It is a technique that published authors use, screenwriters, and classrooms young and old. This post is designed to help you revisit an old strategy and maybe weave in some new techniques to freshen it up a bit. If you are preparing the fall, it may be a perfect time to revisit your classroom weekly teaching routine.

The timing of three minutes is on purpose. It is just long enough to have a moment to think, but not enough time to really have a ton of delay that could cause disruptions in the classroom. I often will be able to put my response in my notebook and warn them just in time that they have a minute and a half left. The timing of this is “enough” time that it is not obtrusive to other activities in a day’s lesson plan. Think short and sweet, but just urgent enough that students will not have much time for hesitation in getting ideas down on paper.

Arthur O’Shaughnessy in his 1874 poem “Ode” wrote: “Yet we are the movers and shakers/Of the world forever, it seems.” I love the term “mover and shaker” because it reminds me of dancing, but what it really lends is to people who make an impact on the world. It is no secret that one of my favorite units to teach is research. I love the choice, the process, and the hard work it takes to produce the product. I also love seeing middle schoolers wrap their brains around the formatting of this project (MLA), and how they get excited about solving problems. One of my favorite things, after all, is to solve problems.

The MLA Research Paper unit I do each winter going into spring focuses on activism. Students identify a problem in their school, community, or world and then research that problem, Inevitably, they see causes, effects, and hypothesize solutions as well. This post will walk you through some mentor texts and resources, strategies, and pacing of the overall unit.

Similes and metaphors might be my favorite figurative language skills to teach because once students notice what they are, they find them everywhere in fiction literature. Similes make everything better. At first glance, students keep reading over them, but the understanding of similes and metaphors unlocks another layer of reading. It is a layer that is deeper and makes readers really think. Figurative language skills matter because they help build critical readers. When building sentence fluency, these skills create stronger readers that add sentence variety and fluency to their writing skills. While you can catch similes in almost any work of fiction these days, I like the books featured in this post for the deliberate instruction of simile usage in literature. This post will outline three books and examples of similes, and it will also show you how I help young writers transfer these skills to their own writing through the mentor text process.

Easy as pie.

For the week back from winter break, I love doing figurative language review, especially with onomatopoeias! If you have been following the mentor text routine on the blog, I always start with a book talk. For onomatopoeias, I love The Wild Robot by Peter Brown because there are so many great examples, and the mentor text example sentences involve the island animals as well. Kids love sounds. Kids love animals. Not only does this lesson provide an easy frame for students to follow, the book naturally pulls kids in with interest and content. This post outlines a quick lesson you can do with your students to use mentor texts and have some fun teaching onomatopoeias.

Compound sentences are all about bringing ideas together or showing how those ideas relate to one another. There is a real opportunity when we start talking about combining sentences together to help build the classroom community and share how our writing looks in different situations. The very nature of conjunctions suggests jointness. It is during these mentor text lessons where I will increase the level of movement and partner work to show how we can generate ideas together. When completing the mentor text routine, I look at how I can book talk mentor text books so students want to read them, and I use the whole class novels that we study during this marking period to show example sentences. Last year, I covered the conjunctions “and” and “but.” This year, I am also adding the conjunction “so” to tie in some cause and effect lessons. This post will outline the mentor text slides and activities used for each sequence of lessons for compound sentences with the conjunctions “and,” “but,” and “so.”

Highlights of each conjunction:

• But-This conjunction is fun to say to middle schoolers over and over, and it shows opposites.

• And-This conjunction connects ideas and shows addition.

• So-This conjunction shows cause and effect, and the ideas here can transfer over to other cause and effect work in class.

The mentor texts for these two weeks, Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, are similar in the sense that they are amazing examples of kids working through problems. Both books are easy to sell during the book talk because kids love books where students are handling conflict. I love teaching irregular verbs over the course of two weeks because the first week we learn what irregular verbs are and then do some practicing with examples. In the second week, we combine standard past tense verbs with an -ed ending, AND we also use irregular verbs in our sentences. We are still building on our work with action verbs/verbs of being and helping verbs from previous weeks.

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander might be one of my all-time favorite mentor texts. It could be because kids love the novel-in-verse format of this book, or the basketball theme, or the fact that they want to know what happens each quarter. This is an easy book to book talk because it just grabs kids. I love using this book to show helping and linking verbs in the present tense. This continues from the work the previous week where students identified action verbs and verbs of being. This lesson speaks to the easy conversational tone that we all have with each other on a daily basis. Kwame Alexander sounds like me. He sounds like you. This directly links to the ability to make grammar accessible because it is something we already know, we just have to know what to call the writer move when we make it.

Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt is our all-sixth grade read. Our district gave all fifth graders this book to read over the summertime, so they have a chance to have a common, shared conversation about a single text when they enter middle school. While not all students take part in the rising class read, all students are given books. The best way to promote this text is through a book talk. Often, I hear students say “I didn’t read this book over the summer,” and then they choose to pick it up after they hear it book talked. We can never forget the power of a book recommendation to our students. The goal for this small mentor text mini-lesson will be to show students the difference between verbs of action and verbs of being.

One of my big mentor text reflections from last year was that I felt like I didn’t spend enough time on the basic parts of the sentence. Things like subject, predicate, verbs, and adjectives. These are the things that middle school teachers are always teaching and re-teaching, but I really wanted to frontload these skills at the beginning of the year. There are so many variations in the English language, so I really want to encourage my sixth-graders to have a strong grasp of the simple sentence before moving forward. Even in my advanced sections where students have reading levels well into the highschool range, they were identified as struggling on identifying the subjects of sentences.

Sometimes the hardest part is knowing where to start. I want to start writing individual posts each week, so that people can follow along with my mentor text routine. It can be daunting looking at all my materials for the first time and thinking:

“How do I find time to read all of these books?”

“How do I teach kids to read like writers?”

“Where do I put this into my curriculum or pacing guide?”

“Can I really teach grammar with books on my shelves?”

The answers to these questions aren’t always easy, but they are possible. We have to make time to show our kids that books have the power to unlock the world of writing in front of them. We have to dedicate space in our own lives for reading because it is one of the greatest forms of self-care. We have to reconfigure our pacing guides to use these resources because we have to prioritize what matters. Figuring out what matters to me as a teacher has always been the struggle. I know without hesitation that the use of mentor texts has changed the way I do business in my classroom. Last year was a road trip of trials and errors, but those experiences and that time spent researching mentor texts was so worth it. Now, I also wanted to share what I am doing to help lighten the load on others.

It might be an interesting experiment to pose some of these questions to your students this fall:

“How do you see your teachers?”

“What do you like or dislike about school?”

“What would you change about how school is setup?”

I bet we would get a ton of answers that would spark debate and some good-natured arguments. Another interesting take on these questions is to look at how school and teachers are represented in popular middle-grade and young adult texts. I originally started working on this post as a way to access narrative writing by looking at how authors portray kids’ thinking about schools and teachers. However, then I got to thinking about the bigger discussion we as teachers need to be having with our students. I am going to use this in my classroom as a way for students to talk about their feelings toward school and teachers, and then connect how they feel to what they want in their own experiences in education moving forward.  I want to keep in mind that these middle-grade and young adult texts are written by adults for young people, but some of their descriptions about school and teachers are surprisingly accurate. It would be interesting to cut up and put some of these passages in front of students to hear what they have to say.

…The same call for inclusivity in the beauty industry is also in the same call for the materials that we put in front of our students. This necessity drives the movements behind #WeNeedDiverseBooks and a call for diverse classroom libraries. We have to make materials available to our students. 

I bring up this description of skin tone though as a conversation starter for how skin color is often depicted in works of fiction. If we focus on diverse literature, it is important to look at how characters are being represented on the page. How are our students able to describe themselves? What descriptions do they see while reading? What is included in our weekly read aloud? These questions impact the makers of stories in the publishing industry, and they impact the strategies we are using to teach our children. These questions are necessary to bring up and think about in terms of engaging with my young writers that need to have access to mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in our classroom.

This post outlines different strategies as they are observed in 16 different middle-grade and young adult works of fiction. I am using mentor texts here to show my young writers that the works of published authors are not only accessible but can be unlocked to show them how to write. This post will give a great starting point to the young writer that desires to describe their character AND also make connections to that character’s background, culture, or identity through the use of skin tone identification. 

In my other post, “Middle-Grade Narrative Writing: Using Mentor Texts to Describe Setting (Snapshots)” I explained how a teacher could use examples or passages in mentor texts to help their young writers add details, description, and imagery to their narrative writing. This ability to “see” or visualize the imagery is called making a snapshot. Snapshots were first introduced to me by the way of Barry Lane’s The Reviser’s Toolbox. Characters really have five areas of focus when it comes to description: thoughts, feelings, actions, appearance, and speech. All of these areas can afford opportunities for students to learn how to do snapshots.

In review, a snapshot is a moment in narrative writing when you stop to describe a person or place in detail. There are many different writing moves to do this technique; however, the gist is the same: stop to inform your reader what the imagery is in your writing so they can become part of the reading experience with you. When you are designing a lesson on snapshots in either setting or character, I first like to start with adjectives and describing things my students know a lot about. Then, we can move on to the more abstract ideas of the imagination. The bridge between simple adjective description and more sophisticated writing resides in the use of mentor texts. I also like to practice all together in a whole group format using pictures. I love Nearpod for this type of practice because students can share adjective word ideas, and you can track whole group class participation. It is also pretty cool whole group collaborative writing. In the post, I will outline four different strategies for helping you to introduce snapshots for character description to your students with a variety of middle-grade mentor texts. I use mentor texts in my classroom to teach grammar, provide book talks to my students, and in writing instruction. Students then mimic the style of published authors and use their writing as a guide to help set up their own writing.

Pernille Ripp asked her readers in her post “What Did You Want to Be This Year?”: “Did you accomplish the goals you set out to reach or did you realize that your life needed something else?”  Pernille Ripp’s blog is one of my favorites because she makes me think and reflect on who I am as a teacher. I love any situation that puts me in student-mode because I am ever learning. Ever since I saw her speak in March at the Michigan Reading Association Conference, I often remind myself of her words: “It is time to be reading warriors” and “for too long we have been too nice.” As I doodled these phrases in my journal during the conference, I nodded my head, I scrunched my nose, I squinted my eyes, and I did some reflecting on my own work. Now, as I close out the 2018-2019 year, I want to focus on what I wanted for myself in my classroom, in my writing lab, and in my teaching life this past year.

And to answer her main question, I accomplished some goals and I realized my teaching life needed something else.

I always start and end the year with narrative writing in some form. While I often focus on things like voice and ideas with this genre of writing, it really is all in the details when it comes to helping the reader see what you are talking about on the page. This ability to “see” or visualize the imagery is called making a snapshot. Snapshots were first introduced to me by the way of Barry Lane’s The Reviser’s Toolbox. I first got a hold of this text working closing with an elementary school teacher writing friend who explained to me, “You know what we do isn’t really all that different.” I have been changed ever since.

Give me a bookstore, a library, or a fellow reader’s bookshelf, and I will browse with wild glee. I love books. The sight of a bag full of books simple makes me happy. Reading has been something that has found its way back to me time and time again. Even when life seems too busy or too full of commitments. I always make my way back to reading.  Using the 10 criteria that I outlined in a previous post about diverse texts, I wanted to write up a blog post about 30 book recommendations I would make right NOW to any middle school English Language Arts teacher to add these middle-grade fictional texts to their classroom library. I use

I am constantly reading books. This wasn’t always the case, and largely, I think I have to attribute my reintroduction to reading all the time to my mentor text work. I am constantly on the mission to find books to recommend to students and use in the classroom with my students for our “write like an author” study. As teachers we are bombarded with an onslaught of a million decisions, pounds of papers to grade, and work that is largely impossible to master. It’s exhausting.

But, it is also exhilarating.

I am not sure I have ever enjoyed teaching grammar this much. Would it be too much to say there is joy in grammar? The journey with mentor texts began back in the summertime when my main focus for summer reading was around the works of Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle, Rebekah O’Dell and Allison Marchetti, and Linda Reif. I was intrigued by the idea that this often used strategy happens at the elementary school level with picture books and at the high school level with higher-level writing craft and organization moves. But, where were my middle school student examples? My middle schoolers were coming to me without basic grammar skills and therefore lacked some key moves in their writing.

After reading Linda Reif’s The Quickwrite Handbook: 100 Mentor Texts to Jumpstart Your Students’ Thinking and Writing this summer, I knew I wanted to incorporate more mentor text work into my classroom this year. This was my ONE thing that I wanted to add that would change up a major system as to how I taught students writing. I also read other texts over the summer that supporting this mindset. It was clear to me: I want my students to call themselves authors.

After confessing the reason I would leave teaching, I wanted to tackle the whole paper problem head on. I often will get an idea in my head and have that "brain-on-fire" type of feeling when it comes to teaching. It is one of the reasons why I teach. However, taking on too huge of a problem without a step-by-step plan is going to lead to burnout.  I feel like the whole "paper problem" is too much to chew on before I am back practicing in real life in the classroom. I want to think about implementing some key changes that I took away from my readings over summer break to change not only my methods, but perhaps the way I do business. From my post where I identified the main problems that exist in my systems and mindset, I have concluded to focus on these three main areas for going back to school:

1.) Using mentors for the teaching of writing. 

2.) Restructuring the writing workshop. Students will write more in class, participate in stations, collaborate with each other and me, etc.

3.) Streamline processes that I have in place so that I am taking less paper home that does not need to go home. (I.E. paper that does not require extra feedback)

I hope you are ready for some great reading! These authors-to-be took this assignment to a whole other level. By focusing on critical literary elements like plot, character, conflict, and setting, students were able to express themselves creatively. I paired this with a simultaneous academic piece so students could write in both modes: creative and academic. The creative mode focused on them making their own Dystopian World after reading Uglies by Scott Westerfeld. They also did a compare and contrast academic piece focusing on modern American Society vs the Dystopian World setup by Westerfeld in Uglies.  This second piece contained contained cited evidence, formal tone, etc.