The Book that Changed My Life as a Teacher

At some point in your teaching career, you will find yourself asking, "What in the world did I get myself into?" and thinking, "I wonder if there are any openings at Home Depot." These thoughts swam in my brain every day during my first year of teaching, at least once a week during my second and third years, and even by my fourth year, I was checking the jobs ads every now and again.

Then, in 2012, something magical happened: I attended an Edcamp professional development workshop. Click here to learn more about Edcamp. At Edcamp, which was without a doubt the best professional development I had attended in four years of teaching, I learned about a phenomenal new book called Teach Like a Pirate, by Dave Burgess.

In a nutshell (even though you can't really put the greatness of this book in a nutshell), this book teaches you to rethink your teaching -- every aspect of it: lesson design, relationships with students, self-reflection. It's about teaching with passion and giving students memorable experiences in and outside the four walls of your classroom. Here are a few ways I used ideas from this book to pirate up my teaching:

The pirate in me

I'm sure I already knew this, as we all do, but was reminded by the author that students' days at school can be monotonous, boring, even dreadfully miserable. This book gave me a plethora of ideas to change that -- at least for my class. One of the simple ways to do so (and I seriously kicked myself for not having thought of this myself) is by creating some suspense.

The teaser

On the second day of my fifth year of teaching, I had planned to do a lesson on learning styles -- so that I could learn more about my students and their learning preferences and so they could learn more about each other, and themselves. Based on Burgess's book, I was going to focus on brain research, and I found a fantastic video to show about how amazing the brain is -- and how it can be fooled by sleight of hand. I also purchased some dollar-store stress balls in the shape of brains, and I had my own brain-designed hat to wear. I planned to throw (er-- gently toss) the brain balls out to students who asked questions and participated in discussion. Now, of course I was extremely excited about this lesson, but I needed to get my kids looking forward to it. So at the end of class on the first day of school, I gave them a simple teaser: "You don't want to miss tomorrow; we're going to be throwing brains around!" And that's it. No more said, even through the onslaught of "What?!" "What do you mean?" "Throwing brains?!" "What are we gonna be doing?" I needed to leave them wondering, leave them in suspense, leave them curious. Sure enough, the next day, students bounded into class asking about the brains.

The mystery

In my 7th-grade ELA class, we would soon be reading Pandora's Box, as well as a few other Greek myths. When planning this lesson, I focused on Burgess's ideas for using props to engage students. I found three small boxes at home (a ring box, a small gift box, etc.). Inside the boxes, I placed a little note that read something like, "I told you not to open it!" Then, the day we were going to be reading Pandora's Box, I handed a box to three random students, telling them, "This is a very special box just for you. But you must place it on your desk and you may NOT open it until the end of class."

As class went on, I watched those students, and so did the curious others. One student sat on his hands so he wouldn't be tempted to open the box. Another student tried to peek without really opening the box. Another had no problem setting the box at the corner of her desk and ignoring it henceforth. As we read the myth, students began to make connections between the story and my act of giving students a box and telling them not to open it. Of course there were other parts to the lesson, other activities we did with the myth, but this simple sidebar with the boxes made it interactive for the students, as if they were part of the story. It created suspense and mystery and engagement.

Selling tickets

Last year, I had a lesson planned that I thought was awesome -- so awesome that I could sell tickets to it. So I did. I had a roll of those red raffle tickets that you can buy at Staples or Office Depot, and I stood at my classroom door. As students approached, I told them I was selling tickets to today's lesson. The cost varied; sometimes it was three smiles and a laugh, for some students the cost was a positive attitude, and for other students the cost was two compliments. As I tore off tickets for students and accepted their payment, I could see in their eyes and their smiles that this was not something they were used to. Yes! I created curiosity. Then, during the lesson, I stopped at three natural breaks to call a ticket number for door prizes.

Using social media

I often used my teacher Facebook page, Twitter, and Edmodo to send out teasers to the next day's lesson. It was such an easy way to get kids excited about coming to school. One day I had a new seating chart, but instead of just telling my students where to sit, I wanted to make it fun. So I made up a little riddle for each student to find the right seat. The Friday night before, I sent this out on Facebook:
"Where, oh, where will my students sit on Monday?
Solve your riddle to have a fun day.
Can you find your seat with just one clue?
If you can read rhymes, you'll know what to do."

Another time, I used Tellagami.com to create this teaser video for my 6th-grade students: https://tellagami.com/gami/KAN1EL/ and posted it on my Facebook teacher page. And this one was for my 8th-graders: https://tellagami.com/gami/Q3LKP5/

Here's a teaser I posted to create suspense for a newscast activity: "Are you ready to be on camera? If so, you will love our next assignment!"


Doing simple teasers like these created excitement for my kids, and the more excited they got, the more excited I got. It was like a crazy, excited cycle of excitement! I've posted before in this blog that I believe if you're not having fun, you're not doing it right. These little nuggets of golden ideas from Teach Like a Pirate helped me find the fun in teaching again when I thought I had lost it.

Giving them something unexpected

For four years in a row, after reading Teach Like a Pirate, I opened the school year with Dave Burgess's first three days activities, which included using Play-Doh on Day 1, and doing the collaborative groups "Who Will Survive" task on Day 3, complete with a costumed skit by Yours Truly. If this sounds like Greek to you, you must read the book. One of the main concepts the book emphasizes is giving students memorable experiences. When you make your lessons stand out from the rest, when you allow yourself to take risks and do something different, you will find your students so much more engaged and willing to participate. Until reading this book, I never imagined that I would dress as a witch and come to school as Mrs. McGonnawrite for a weeklong Hogwrites School of Word Craft and Editing. I never imagined that I would hold a dance-off with a difficult student. I never imagined that I would be able to turn workbook-style lessons into games and kinesthetic activities.

Pirate on, teachers. Pirate on.

This book truly saved my teaching. It lifted me up from the depths of "What have I gotten myself into?" and brought me to "What will I do for my students next?"! Now that I am no longer in the classroom, I miss having the chance to change students' lives with inspiring lessons. So I am spreading Burgess's message in my new position as an ELA strategist, sharing my passion for this author's theories with the teachers I am coaching. There are so many PD books out there -- some fantastic ones, yes -- but this one is the only one I would say is a must-read. Really. And I am not alone. I quickly learned after the aforementioned magical Edcamp that Teach Like a Pirate had developed quite the cult following. It has become so popular over the years that I feel a bit like I'm arriving late to dinner by posting this now. But if you haven't read it yet, go get it! You will not regret it. It made such an impression on me that I have asked my boss to purchase copies of the book so I can present a Teach Like a Pirate PD and distribute books to secondary teachers in my district.

8 Tips for Implementing RTI in the Middle School ELA Classroom

I've been MIA since school started. All educators know what that's like. The school year is simply too busy for us to keep up with extras like blogs. Thank goodness for the weeklong Thanksgiving break -- we get a breather, a minute to relax, and a minute to write a blog post.

Time is all we need

Lack of time is one of the biggest issues secondary teachers face when it comes to conducting small-group interventions. I was lucky to teach at campuses with double-blocked ELA classes (90 minutes!), but not all campuses in my district follow that schedule. Several have class periods that are roughly 50 minutes long, and once you subtract minutes for settling in, administrivia, housekeeping, and the like, those classes are more like 40 minutes, on the generous end.

I've been working with a new teacher to help her get small groups for RTI started, and last week when I co-taught with her, I was hit with an eye-opening reality check. Those 50 (or really 40) minutes absolutely fly by, and it can seem virtually impossible to carve out time for interventions.

That reality check got me to thinking long and hard about how middle school campuses can effectively implement RTI, and I've come up with some tips -- all of which I would be following if I were still a classroom teacher.

1. Shorten the length of your whole-class direct instruction.

This may require a paradigm shift for many teachers, as it calls for a whole new way of thinking about lesson planning. But think about it this way: If your whole-class instruction (the "I do" part) is cut to 15 minutes or less, and guided practice (the "we do" part) is about 15 minutes, that leaves 15-20 minutes for independent practice (the "you do" part). And it is during this independent practice time that you can maximize student learning by pulling a small group for a targeted intervention.

2. Consider flipping the classroom.

The flipped classroom design has its disadvantages (not all students have Internet access at home, many middle school students simply will not do the at-home assignments, etc.), but if you can give students even just a portion of the "I do" part of the next day's lesson to do at home, you save yourself a few valuable minutes that can be spent on guided and independent practice during class -- which means you'll also open up more time to pull small groups.

3. Invest in stations.

Some secondary teachers may view learning stations as an "elementary thing," but I can tell you from first-hand experience that middle schoolers love them and they were about the best thing I ever did in my classroom. I often set up literacy stations with reading and writing activities that were fun for my kids (and for me!). They included board games, card games, fun writing prompts, and reading response activities. This always took more time to set up on the front end, but the results were unarguably positive: Students were engaged in the activities (didn't even realize they were actually learning while playing); the class time had built-in brain breaks, because students were rotating every 12-15 minutes to a new activity; and it freed me up to pull small groups. With station rotations, you have a couple of options for RTI. You can oversee the whole class as they work in their groups, and when the time is right, you can go work with specific groups of students who need intervention. Or you can make one of the stations a guided-reading-with-the-teacher station, which is what I did quite often. That way, all groups eventually rotate through to me, and I can intervene for the struggling kids and extend for the stronger readers. (This required pregrouping based on data.)

4. Take advantage of SSR time.

Through recent classroom observations, I have seen many teachers using SSR in the classroom (yay!!). But in all cases, the teacher sat and read independently as well. While this is a good practice because it shows students that the teacher values reading for pleasure as well, in that 20-minute SSR period, the teacher could have easily worked with a struggling reader or two while everyone else read silently. During my grad-school program, I did extensive research on SSR, and one of my findings was that a more structured SSR period -- in which the teacher holds reading conferences with individual students or pulls small groups for interventions -- was more effective and beneficial for students. Perhaps the teacher can read silently with her students for 5-10 minutes to show her passion for reading, but then she can swing by the desk of a few students and have a quick reading conference, work with a student on fluency, give a quick mini-lesson on using context clues, or pull a small group for a targeted intervention.

5. Put students with partners.

One way to shave time off of guided practice and independent practice is to have students work with a partner. Many secondary teachers scoff at this idea because they feel that middle school children need to learn to work efficiently on their own. Indeed, when I first started teaching, I was under the tutelage of a quite brilliant veteran teacher who believed in rows and silent independent work. I tried to follow in her footsteps, but over the years I observed that kids really do learn better, learn more, and learn faster when they are given opportunities to be collaborative. And so one year I finally did away with rows permanently, and from then on out, I had my desks arranged in groups of 3 or 4, and sometimes pairs -- but never rows (except during testing, of course). After your direct instruction, when students practice the skill with your help and then apply the skill without your help, if they work with a partner (or in a small group, even), they can complete the assignment in less time than if they had to navigate it alone.

6. Use timers religiously.

This may sound like such a simple thing, but sometimes this happens: You teach and teach and teach, and before you know it, it's time for the bell and you're only halfway through the day's lesson plan, and you wonder where the time went and why nobody finished their work. When you plan your lesson, you should pace it out and set a time limit for each portion of the lesson. Then stick to those times as best as you can. Use your phone -- or better yet, one of those handy online timers that you can display for your students. Yes, interruptions will happen, things will need to be retaught or explained more than you originally thought, but at least by using a timer for every activity, you have a guide to go by. And later you can analyze where the time went. Setting time limits will allow you to plan time for interventions.

7. Hand over some power.

Elementary teachers seem to have this down -- all routine classroom chores are delegated, every child has a job, and the teacher is free to teach. By turning over the mundane tasks (sharpening pencils, handing out journals, moving desks, gathering textbooks, or even turning on the projector), your classroom can run like clockwork without you at the helm every second of the class period. So while you are working with a small group of intervention students, someone else is in charge and students can handle little issues that arise. You won't have to stress and try to rush through an intervention lesson thinking that you still have to do X, Y, and Z, because you will have students whose job is to do X, Y, and Z for you.

8. Be realistic.

Understand that you will not be able to meet with all RTI groups every day. Get yourself a planner and set up a realistic schedule. Decide which students need the most help, and plan to meet with them for 10-12 minutes two or three times a week. Once you get started and ease into a routine, you can add on groups of your middle-tier students. Contrary to the pressure that society tends to place on teachers today, we are not all-powerful. So you do what you can with what you have.

Some ideas for intervention lessons

* Use your district's most recent benchmark exam and do a guided reading on a passage students had the most trouble with.
* Use a lower-lexile version of a text the whole class is reading and target a specific skill your intervention kids need help with.
* Try word work. Many struggling readers are struggling because of gaps in their learning -- they're missing basic phonics skills or elementary vocabulary and grammar skills. In my TPT store, I have a bundle of word work and word puzzle activities designed to help fill those gaps. You can access it by clicking on the picture:

I would love to hear how other secondary teachers are making time for RTI! Leave a comment below.

How to Teach Theme in Middle School

Let the unteaching begin

There are a number of concepts that students learn one way in elementary school and a different way in middle school. We essentially have to unteach what they learned in elementary to address misconceptions. Linear plot is one that comes to mind, as in elementary, students are taught plot using a triangle, where the climax of the story occurs perfectly in the middle. Google "plot chart," and you will find a gazillion of these plot triangles. Say it ain't so. As an ELA teacher, this is highly frustrating, because in no story ever does the climax occur in the middle. So we unteach that -- over and over, in 6th grade, 7th grade, and still in 8th.

Theme is another concept we have to reteach in a more accurate way, because students come to middle school thinking that theme is one word -- like courage, or hope, or love. It appears that this is the way theme is taught in elementary. This creates a huge misconception for students, especially as they read more challenging texts.

What is theme?

Theme is not one word. That one word -- courage, hope, or love -- is a topic. If a student says a story or poem is about courage, she must ask herself, "What is the author trying to say about courage?" Then you have the theme. Hence the misconception: Students in 6th grade and beyond have trouble distinguishing between theme and topic. So we must extend students' thinking beyond that one word.

Theme is a message embedded in the text. A lesson. A moral. A universal idea. All parts of the story (or poem) contribute to or influence the theme. How the characters feel and act, how they respond to the conflict, how the conflict is resolved -- these things develop the theme. The setting plays a role in development of the theme as well. So how do we get kids to comprehend this complex idea?

Concentric circles

Last year I learned about a method to teach the theme of a poem, and I found that it works well with all literary genres. It uses a concentric circle graphic organizer:

How it works: 
1.) After reading the text, students write the topic of the text in the inner-most circle. That should be just one word, such as "Friendship."
2.) In the next circle, students write the text evidence that proves the text is about that topic. For example, how do you know it's about friendship? Text evidence may include the title, or perhaps the two main characters are best friends and in the story these friends go through the trials and tribulations of friendship, or perhaps there is a sentence within the text that says something specific about friendship.
3.) In the third circle, students answer the question, "What do you as a reader learn about the topic?" So for our example -- the topic of friendship -- students would explain what that text teaches them about friendship. Answers will vary, but the key is providing text evidence. Perhaps the friends in the story struggle through a conflict but in the end they stick together. So the reader learns that true friendship is lasting.
4.) In the final circle, students answer the question, "What do you think the author believes about the topic?" This will be based on text evidence and what happens in the text. This answer may be very close to what students wrote in the previous circle. Students would write, "The author believes that..." and for our example, perhaps it is something like, "The author believes that friends should stick together no matter what."
5.) The last step is to cross out "The author believes that," and what remains is your theme statement -- a complete sentence that expresses  a universal theme and is based on text evidence!

Get it for free

You can download my Finding Theme with Concentric Circles activity for free at my TPT store:

Tips for Writing Conference Success

I will admit upfront that I never felt fully comfortable conducting writing conferences. I didn't feel that it was an area in which I excelled. However, when I did succeed at conferring with my students, I felt wholeheartedly that the process was extremely valuable for both me and the student. Because that one-on-one collaborative conversation is such an important part of writing instruction, I have worked on ways to improve my skills as a teacher, and I wanted to share my ideas with you.

The power of writing conferences

Writing conferences have so many benefits. Following is only a partial list of the incredible good that comes from them. One-on-one writing conferences allow the teacher to:
* praise and encourage self-doubting writers
* build relationships
* guide students through brainstorming and planning
* answer specific questions
* re-teach writing concepts
* stretch students' imaginations and writing skills
* build students' confidence
* check for understanding and clarify misconceptions
* improve students' discussion skills
* improve students' revising and editing skills
You can probably think of several more benefits of writing conferences. With all of these possibilities, why would anyone not do writing conferences? I mean, how many single lessons do all of these things in one shot?

Types of writing conferences

Whenever I struggled to do writing conferences over the years, the reason always came back to time. Time is a huge factor in any lesson plan, but when you have 25+ students, it can take an entire week to conduct a formal, thorough writing conference with every student. So I improvised. I found that there are three types of writing conferences that I would conduct, depending on each student's needs:

Formal conference: This is a formal one-on-one conference lasting 10 minutes (or even more at times) that I would hold with my highest-needs students. It is heavily planned and prepared for. I would do this type of conference after my students had written an essay for our district writing benchmark, I had scored it and written comments on it, and now it was time to confer and have students revise and rewrite to submit as a final draft. The hope was that they would improve their score by going through this process. For this conference, I would want my students to prepare as well. One year, we had a pre-conference form for students to fill out, and I found that it was too complicated and time-consuming, and most of my students didn't even understand what to write. So I have created a simplified one that has the components I think are the most important. You can download it by clicking on the picture:

In the formal conference, you can either sit next to the student at his or her desk, or sit at a designated spot in the room. Either way, it is important to sit next to rather than across from the student, as this is a conversation, not an interview. The student will feel less intimidated this way. I always start with positives by showing the student what she did well on the essay. Then, despite the fact that there may be a million things that need work, I focus on one or two main things I want the student to work on to improve her essay. The goal is an improved essay, not necessarily a perfect essay. I also want the conference to be largely student-led rather than me doing all the talking, so I will start by having the student tell me what she liked and didn't like about her writing. I want to make sure that all of her questions are answered as well. It is important to be very clear about the weaknesses I see (remember, just one or two) and about the improvements I want her to make. Then I'll end by having her clarify and confirm for me what her next steps are, to make sure I see that she understands what she needs to do. There's a spot for that on the form.

At this point, I can either make a copy of her form for my records, or I can keep track of conferences and student progress on my own progress monitoring form (a pretty common one that I adapted to match the 7th-grade STAAR expository rubric):

This form allows me to mark which skills I'm targeting with a student each time we confer. At the next conference, we can look back the marks and comments from the previous one to check the student's progress.

Drive-by conference: Sometimes I don't need to do a full-length formal conference. Maybe students are in the pre-writing or drafting stage, or maybe I have some students who are strong writers and don't need me to sit down with them for 10 minutes. For those cases, there's what I call the "drive-by conference," and this is one that you are probably doing in your classroom every time students are writing. It is still one-on-one, but it can be really quick, and I can do several of them in one class period, maybe even with every student in the class. This type of conference does not tend to be pre-planned, or at least not overly so. I will scoot up next to a student and ask her some specific questions about her writing and where she is in the process. I will read a portion of her writing, point out some "glows" and then talk to her about one "grow." Even with the much shorter drive-by conference, I still want to always close with next steps, either by asking the student to tell me what her next steps are or by telling her what I think her next steps should be.

Small-group conference: Sometimes I need to do a formal conference with some -- or all -- of my students, but there is just not the time to do so (it always comes down to time). So I will pre-plan some small-group conferences. I will go through all of my students' writing and sort them into "target skill" piles. For example, maybe there are three students who did not answer the prompt, so I need to meet with them and break down the prompt with them to help them understand it. Maybe there are four students who wrote in the wrong genre, so I will conference with those four to re-teach a mini-lesson on the elements of expository writing. And maybe there are a few students whose main problem was conventions, so I will meet with them to work on editing strategies. While the small-group conference may last just as long as a formal one-on-one conference, it is saving time because I'm working with three or four students at a time.

So worth it

No matter which type of conference you conduct, I believe you will find the outcome well worth the time spent.

Now, when it comes to editing and revising, there are so many different things you can do. I have a product in my TPT store for editing and revising that has gotten tremendous results for me when I used it with my students. It uses an old but apparently little-known method called CDO and works great for small-group instruction. I have created some supplemental aids to go with it, and it's only $2!:

Lessons from Primary

There was a time when I thought I wanted to teach kindergarten, but when the time came to choose which certification I would pursue, I chose middle school. I did so because I remember middle school being hellish for me: I was awkward, I was ugly, and I didn't fit in with any group but desperately wanted to, causing me to do some really stupid things (like the time I cut my own hair, but we don't need to go into that). So I felt that I could relate to middle-school kids and make a difference for them.

Superheroes

Plus, there's somewhat of a status symbol attached to being a middle school teacher. See, when a person says she teaches elementary, the response generally goes, "Awwww, so sweeeet! What fun! They're so cute!" and much cheeky smiling follows. When a person says she teaches high school, the response is, "Nice! Very cool," and respectful handshaking follows. Now, tell people you teach middle school, and they lurch backward, their eyes go wonky, and they say, "Whoa! Middle school. God bless you," and sympathetic pats on the back occur until the awestruck parties slink away, thanking their lucky stars that their job is not as hard as yours. I relish the fact that all my years in education have been spent nurturing the one age group that everyone thinks is insane. It's like a badge of courage. Or a superhero cape.

Happy little people

Now, in my new position as a secondary ELA strategist, I am navigating many challenges and tests. Today's test came in the form of pint-sized people. I was assigned a campus (apparently at random) to help out with first-day-of-school madness. This particular campus is a pre-school campus. Despite what you may be thinking, I must first say that there was no madness. First-day-of-school arrival worked like a well-oiled machine, and dismissal was just as orderly, despite a drenching downpour that thundered in just as parents arrived to pick up their babies. So I feel obligated to share some ideas that are used in pre-school that could totally work in middle school as well.

Singing

It's no secret that music makes everyone feel better. Primary grades use singing for many purposes: to welcome students in the morning, for transitions between activities or lessons, to celebrate achievements, to say goodbye at the end of the day. They sing about the weather, they sing about their friends, they sing about numbers, they sing about colors, they sing about tying shoes and going to the bathroom and eating their food and washing their hands. They sing about everything, all the time, every day. And then in middle school, the singing stops. Why? Incorporating songs and music into lessons during the school day would brighten moods and quash the monotony. One school in our district has music playing in the hallways at all times. What a cheerful place to be!

Color-coding

At the pre-school where I was stationed today, colors meant everything. There was a blue hall and a red hall and a yellow hall; there were yellow tags that helped match child to parent; there were teachers in colored shirts that I surmised must correspond with some secret color code. And all of these colors helped children and parents know where to go and what to do. Color coding could be beneficial in middle school, too, what with all of the different classes, projects, and homework kids need to keep straight. You'd have to be careful, though, because in the pre-teen years, some kids become concerned with gang colors. I once had a student who refused to use a pencil that was generously offered to him because it was red, and his gang of choice was the blue one. To combat that issue, you could use pastels or fluorescents. I'm pretty sure that there is no gang affiliation with Pepto pink or mint green.

Recess

I did not have the privilege today of joining the pre-school children at recess, but I saw the playground. What a fun, colorful, inviting place it was. All children need some time each day to run off some energy, unwind, and socialize -- even older kids. I hate that recess is taken away in middle school. I think having a little recess would cut down on a good chunk of the behavior issues that teachers encounter in middle school. I mean, even prisons have outdoor recreation time.

Perkiness

If there's one difference between teachers of primary-grade children and teachers of secondary children, it is perkiness. Teachers of older kids (myself included) tend to look a bit haggard, perhaps grumpy, a little put out. Not all the time, of course, but, well, most of the time. It's not their fault -- remember the superhero thing. Teachers of little ones are smiley, happy, cheerful -- literally bouncing with joy. And that makes all the difference. At the pre-school where I was stationed, a great crowd of us gathered at the front entrance and welcomed the new students and their parents, and those faculty who were used to this sort of thing were positively dripping with cheer. (My cheeks hurt after an hour of welcome duty.) With such a positive opening to the school day, it was impossible for anyone to be anything less than thrilled to be there. We should bring some joy back to the secondary school setting. Take a note from the Ron Clark Academy and roll out the red carpet for our scholars. Make them feel like they are entering the best place in the world.

Spending some time at a pre-school building was a real eye-opener for me. It made me reflect on the primary-grade experiences that are thrown out as kids get older but don't really need to be. With a little adjustments for maturity, so many "little-kid" procedures and methods can and should be continued all the way into high school.

I have a few products in my TeachersPayTeachers store that bring a little elementary style into the mix. One of them is this one:

A Fun Way to Practice and Review Roots and Affixes

So I have a confession to make: I never enjoyed teaching roots and affixes. The workbooks and worksheets available for such lessons were torture for me and the students. Foldables were not as engaging as they were with other concepts. Even the educational board game I tried to use in class was too difficult for my students. And I was just plain bad at teaching this aspect of word work.

That being said, I know how crucial it is for children's vocabulary development and reading comprehension skills to practice roots and affixes. It is a vital part of vocabulary instruction. So this summer, while playing around with some vocabulary card game ideas, I came up with one for roots and affixes. The game is played similarly to UNO, sans colors and numbers. Players are dealt seven cards each, and the rest of the deck is placed face-down in the center, with one card turned face-up in a discard pile to begin the game. The first player begins by playing off of the word part shown on the starting card. If the starting card says trans, and the first player has a card that says port, he can play that card to make transport. Now the next person must play off of port. Or he can play off of transport. The first person to get rid of all of his or her cards wins the game.

Here are just some of the cards included in the 96-card set.

Now, in my new position as an ELA strategist, I am not in the classroom to test this game out on kids. But today, I presented the card game to a group of middle- and high-school ELA teachers, and I was blown away by how well it was received. Here are some pictures of my district's teachers playing the game:

As I watched teachers play this game, I saw such engagement, heard much laughter, and saw spirited competition. The group in the last photo improvised a new way to play, making it more like dominoes than UNO. I could see that everyone in the room was having a blast with this game, but I wanted to know two important things: Would students enjoy the game, and would they learn from it? The answer to both questions was a resounding yes from the 30 or so teachers who participated in this workshop, and they all wanted to take this resource to use in their classrooms.

So, have I found a fun way to practice and review roots and affixes? I think so. You can purchase this game from my TPT store by clicking on the product cover below.

The game is called Word War I, and I intend to make a second version called -- you guessed it -- Word War II.

Word Work in Secondary School

Having taught in middle school my entire teaching career, I had heard vaguely of "word work" as something only elementary schools do -- you know, with phonics or something like that. It wasn't until a professional development session offered by my district a couple of years ago that I discovered that word work can be done in middle school as well -- and it is very much needed, especially as our populations of English language learners increase and reading scores decrease.

Reading deficits

It always surprised me how many basic phonics and spelling generalizations my students didn't know, such as the silent e for a long vowel sound, removing the silent e to add ing, and doubling the consonant to add ed or ing for a short vowel sound. Many ELLs that came through my classroom over the years struggled with spelling words in past tense ("wisht" for wished, or "wantit" for wanted) and with that pesky silent h ("whith" for with, or "wat" for what).

Oddly, it wasn't just the ELLs who were making such mistakes. There seemed to be an epidemic of pre-teens and teens who could not spell age-appropriate words. The connection between spelling ability and reading achievement is well-documented. If a child does not know common English spelling patterns, as evidenced through their writing, it stands to reason that they are not successfully decoding words with those patterns as they read either, which is affecting their reading fluency and comprehension. And this is compounded by the fact that their vocabulary bank account is virtually empty to begin with. With poor phonics knowledge, they have nowhere to draw from to increase their vocabulary funds or simply to break even when dealing with increasingly more difficult grade-level texts. So these students end up falling further and further into reading deficit.

To frustrate matters, in middle school, there is no room in the curriculum for remedial phonics lessons, no time to teach and reteach students reading and spelling concepts they should have mastered by second grade. The situation seems quite hopeless, but there are ways to make hefty vocabulary, spelling, and reading deposits for our kids.

Word work deposits

When a professional development session introduced me to a few file-folder word work activities, which can be used as 10-minute bell-ringers, in literacy stations, or as small-group interventions, I spent a summer creating my own. Many of them are phonics exercises that tackle the generalizations mentioned earlier, as well as distinguishing between the different sounds that ough, ow, and ch can make, or when to use ie vs. ei. 

Other folder activities tackle reading and spelling at the syllable and word level -- roots and affixes, making compound words, parts of speech. Still others take it to the sentence level, using a cloze reading activity. My favorite activities are the ones that delve into the nuances of English word meanings. For example, look at the words walk and run. There are, of course, many different ways to walk and run, and if you grab a handful of synonyms for each of those words, they all mean something slightly different. Using a "degrees of meaning" activity, students can sort the words on a plot line from slowest (amble, perhaps) to fastest (sprint), with such words as stride, canter, and lope filling out the line in between. Vocabulary activities such as word ladders, completing analogies, and categorical word sorts are also beneficial word work exercises for struggling middle school readers.

How I did this

I spent last summer, as I said, creating word work folders (I think I created about 25) using sticky notes. I used the word work activities as beginning-of-class group work. Each group would take a different folder and spend about 10 minutes working on it together. We made a section of students' interactive notebooks into a Word Work section, and students were responsible for copying down any chart or list of words appearing in their word work activity for that day. My intention was for each group to do one word work exercise each day.

The good news: I could tell that these activities were highly constructive for my low readers. The students were engaged and learning. I was initially concerned that the activities would be too easy for 7th-graders, but, again, I found that there were so many phonics, spelling, and vocabulary skills my students were lacking, so the activities were perfect practice for them.

The bad news: The activities did turn out to be a bit too easy for my pre-AP kids, for the most part, so I continued using the folders only in my on-level class, and even then, I unfortunately did not use them as often as I had intended. I do strongly believe that if I had used the activities more often, I would have been able to see marked improvement in spelling and overall reading. The other negative was that the sticky notes began to lose their stick after so many uses.

How you can do this

My experience with these word work folder activities, and my belief that word work is absolutely necessary in the middle school ELA classroom, inspired me to create a word work product for my TeachersPayTeachers store, and I intend to make more. For this first set, I have compiled 20 word work activities (including all of the activities mentioned above, and more), with clear instructions for students and teachers. Click the photo below to go to my store and see a preview.

And Part 2:

The small details

Here is how I suggest using the product once you print it out:

I cut a small mailing envelope and taped it to the folder to keep all of the cut-out words in. I would laminate the words, and the folders too, if you have the time -- that would certainly help the activities last a long time. I think the most challenging part of managing this would be preventing the little pieces of paper from getting lost. I have used Velcro dots with folder games before, but that takes quite a bit of prep work. In lieu of that, I would assign one person at each group to be in charge of the pieces. Middle school students really love being given such jobs, and they will take it seriously.

One thing I love about these folder activities is that the kids feel like they're playing a game, but they are working on such important skills that benefit them in every aspect of reading. I would love to hear from other secondary teachers who use word work regularly.

Similar products

I have some other products that are great for literacy centers, stations, and interventions: