Organizing Standards Based Instruction in Middle School ELA

 

As an ELA teacher, I am tasked with teaching reading and writing in one 45-minute period. They also ask me to incorporate conventions and grammar when I teach writing.  

At the beginning of the year, it seems like I have sooooo much time to do all of this and it will be "no problem". But then, it always seems like I run out of time for one reason or another. 

So, to avoid that for the future, I decided to sketch out the year as a kind of pacing guide.  I didn't write out full lesson plans here - just laid out what I will teach when to make sure that I am not scrambling anymore and to be more intentional about how things fit together and flow.

For example, it makes sense to start with the central idea and theme standard as it includes supporting details and summary writing.  These are foundational skills for just about everything else. And then this also means that informative writing has to come before argumentative writing as a result.  

Get a free copy of my full-year Middle School ELA Curriculum and Pacing Guide by clicking here.

Then drilling down to the everyday, I use a 6 step process for teaching my standards.  But I don't use all 6 steps in one day - they are spread out over a week.  Here's my lesson plan:

As you can see, I teach a full standard in about a week and a half on average.  Of course, there are times when I spend more time on a topic or less time on a topic, depending on my students and depending on the text.  Sometimes there are just some really great things we need to do with a text in addition to analyzing it for the standard.  ;)

You can get a free copy of the entire Theme Unit (with the lesson plans you saw above) in my Free Resource Library:

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