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Creative Reading Response Activities for any Novel

Are you looking for ways to make your independent reading more engaging? Try these reading response activities! Using reading response activities is a great way to give students choice and help them connect to the texts they read. Middle and high school students want to share their opinions in addition to learning to analyze, and these activities can develop both skill sets. Creative Reading Response Activities for Secondary ELA What are reading response activities? Reading response activities ask students to refer to the text as they make an observation, argument, or prediction. These are useful for independent reading activities and class novels because students ground their writing with supporting details from a fiction or nonfiction text. Example reading response prompts: Reading response activities are great informal daily writing. They can be short – perhaps 4-6

Danielle Hall September 7, 2022

Poetry for High School Students – 3 Tips to Boost Engagement

High-interest and low-prep lessons and activities you can utilize when teaching poetry for high school students. Poetry for High School Students Do your high schoolers’ eyes glaze over at the word “sonnet”? Do they find poetry “booorrrrring?” You aren’t failing them, and I’m here to help! Today I’m sharing some tips and lesson ideas that are sure to help engage even the most reluctant poetry readers in your class. 1. How do you make poetry interesting? Sometimes all it takes to help make poetry a more appealing subject to your high school students is changing the types of poems you are presenting to them. These blog posts are all focused on helping you to provide a wider and more inclusive variety of poetry for high school students in your classroom: Contemporary Poems by Black Authors

Leila Hobbs August 30, 2022

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Creating a Museum Exhibit in Your ELA Classroom

Creating a museum exhibit in your middle or high school ELA classroom is easy and fun with these step-by-step tips and ideas. Let’s talk about how to turn a classroom into a museum! Creating a museum exhibit is a great way to provide student choice in any subject area, and Secondary ELA is no exception. A classroom museum project can hit so many standards, all while transforming your classroom for the day. What does a great classroom museum project accomplish? Any museum project asks students to zoom in on a person, object, or event and showcase it in a way that’s interesting to a passerby. This means that students are researching and curating information. Since they can’t say everything in their museum exhibit, they’ll be selecting the main idea and choosing important supporting details. Sounds

Danielle Hall August 23, 2022

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Easy Prompts to Improve Writing Skills in 5 Minutes

Yes, you can improve writing skills in five minutes! I’ll share some tips and a FREE resource to get you started. How these prompts improve writing skills These journal prompts have students respond to a wide variety of topics and build confidence, endurance, creativity, and enthusiasm for daily writing. Designed to be completed in five minutes or less, these journal prompts are perfect for middle school bell ringers or exit tickets. Want to enjoy a week’s worth of these prompts for ✨FREE✨? You can access the downloadable freebie in the product preview section of the resource! The full resource includes: These low-stakes, short journal writing prompts will boost struggling writers’ stamina and confidence. Each prompt asks about personal experiences, meaning there’s no “right or wrong” answer. Middle school writing prompts with pictures Including writing prompts

Leila Hobbs August 17, 2022

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Back to School: 5 Easy Public Speaking Tips for Students

You can use these low-prep lessons filled with public speaking tips in middle or high school ELA. They make for great icebreaker activities! Back to School Public Speaking Activities Back to School is the perfect time to strengthen your student’s public speaking skills. These public speaking tips and activities are a great way to build classroom community, so you can achieve multiple goals within the same class period. I’ve blogged before about using Children’s Books to Teach Public Speaking, so if you haven’t already read that post, go check it out! 🙂 Low-stress Public Speaking Activities Back to School Peer Interview Project Students brainstorm open-ended questions and use them to interview a classmate. Then, they present to their classmates in very short presentations. I really love this activity because it helps students understand open-ended vs.

Danielle Hall August 10, 2022

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Teaching with Music – My 4 Favorite Broadway Songs for ELA

Teaching with music is a great tool for engaging students, and the Broadway canon has so much great material to choose from. Here are my 4 favorites for ELA. I think that by providing our students with a wider variety of texts we can engage every student in the classroom, and music is a big part of my teaching toolbox. Check out my posts 15 Songs and 15 More Songs for even more ideas. Today I want to talk about one specific genre of music: Broadway showtunes. With the popularity of recent musicals like Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and tick, tick, BOOM, musical theatre is growing in relevance to teens and tweens. Let’s use that interest to help them engage with their Secondary ELA lessons 🙂 Teaching with Music – Broadway songs “My Shot” from

Leila Hobbs August 2, 2022

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4 Easy Tips for Making Your Own Worksheets

Making your own worksheets has never been easier, thanks to Microsoft Powerpoint and these easy-to-follow tips. Have you ever wondered how to make cute worksheets like the ones you find on TeachersPayTeachers? Even if you don’t want to know how to be a TpT seller, you can still make your own worksheets for your classroom. Here are some tips: How to design a worksheet in Word Don’t. Yep, you read that right! Most of the worksheets that you find on TeachersPayTeachers are designed in Microsoft PowerPoint, NOT Microsoft Word. Have you ever tried to insert an image into Microsoft Word and spent a long time trying to get it “just right”? Have you ever had Word bump all of your text to a new page, just to give that image the right amount of space?

Danielle Hall July 19, 2022

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7 Contemporary Poems by Black Authors for Secondary ELA

These contemporary poems by Black authors will help diversify your poetry unit, help students process current events, and even help engage reluctant poetry readers. Listen y’all, I’m not hating on the classics! Groundbreaking and hugely influential Black poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes, etc. all deserve a place in the ELA curriculum. However, it’s not enough for us to only teach the classics, especially when it comes to poetry. It’s easy for students to feel like poetry is “boring” or irrelevant, so today, I’m sharing seven contemporary poems by Black authors to help your students connect with the voices and experiences of their peers, not their grandparents. Contemporary Poems by Black Authors: “In This Place (An American Lyric)” by Amanda Gorman “There’s a place where this poem dwells— it is

Leila Hobbs July 12, 2022

9 Summer Bucket List Ideas for ELA Teachers

It’s summertime, and that (hopefully!) means rest and relaxation! Here are nine things for every English teacher’s summer bucket list. These suggestions include some super fun and super enriching activities. Summer Bucket List for Teachers – 9 Ideas What are your summer goals? For me and my wife, Amanda, our summer is all booked up spending time with the newest addition to our family. Maybe you, too, have your summer all planned out. But if you’re stuck in a rut, or having analysis paralysis, here are 9 ideas to get you started 🙂 Grow your teaching toolbox Read a book for professional development. And no, it need not focus on reading strategies or teaching writing! For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood by Christopher Emdin is a critical look at how we relate to our

Danielle Hall July 5, 2022

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5 Tips for Reading Conferences That Encourage Independent Reading

Reading conferences that encourage independent reading, while still upholding your standards for comprehension. Your students will thank you! Whether you are trying out reading conferences for the first time, or you are looking for ways to make them more effective, I can help! What makes a good reading conference? Obviously, the main goal of a reading conference is to assess the students’ comprehension of their book choice, but I think a successful reading conference should also strengthen your relationship with the student. In order to make effective book recommendations to them in the future, it might help to take notes (or even create a spreadsheet) with little reminders to yourself, such as, “Harrison loves mysteries but hates anything overly violent,” or “Priya gets bored with long series,’ recommend her standalones or duologies.” I have more

Leila Hobbs June 28, 2022

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Short Story Unit Assessments Made Easy

There are a million and one ways to do a short story unit, and they’re all awesome! Short stories are a great way to teach the elements of literature. Also, if students aren’t enjoying a short story, there’s always a new one in a couple of days. Short Story Unit Plan I like to do several short stories at the beginning of the year. My short story unit is a great way to make sure that students understand the elements of literature before we deep dive into analysis in later class novels and plays. I like to focus on one element of literature per short story. If you need a ready-made Short Story Unit, check out this resource! Teachers are saying: “This is one of the best items I have ever purchased. The unit is

Leila Hobbs June 14, 2022

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8 Captivating Novels in Verse for Secondary ELA Students

Whether you’re hosting a lit circle or adding to your classroom library, these novels in verse will be a big hit with your secondary ELA students. I love incorporating verse novels into the classroom! The fact that they have compelling stories, and easy-to-connect with characters makes verse novels an ideal choice for reluctant poetry readers. Students that aren’t typically interested in poetry, but who are interested in the story, can grow to appreciate the writing style. Keeping a few verse novels in your classroom library is also a great way to let students explore poetry in a “no pressure” setting. In this post, I’ll share some novels in verse for middle and high school ELA, plus some extension/enrichment activities that you can use to accompany the books. If you want to pick up any of

Leila Hobbs June 7, 2022

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10 Inspirational Writing Quotes for High School Students

These inspirational writing quotes will help energize the young writers in your classroom, and get them excited to write! Writing Quotes for High School Students There are many ways to inspire young writers, from providing them with a diverse classroom library to letting them collaborate with their peers in a writer’s workshop. It’s also vital to let them learn from the best by introducing them to quotes about writing from the experts. So without further ado, I hope you enjoy my favorite inspirational writing quotes 🙂 “Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” —Philip José Farmer So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.” -Virginia

Danielle Hall May 31, 2022

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5 New Short Stories for Teaching American Lit

Change it up with these NEW short stories for teaching American Lit in middle & high school ELA. Best of all? These 5 stories are all available online for FREE! Today I’m sharing five new short stories for middle and high school ELA, and more specifically, new short stories for teaching American Lit. You might notice that four out of five of these stories are written by women, and four out of five stories are also written by people of color. That’s not a coincidence. Too often, American Lit curriculums are populated by DWG’s (dead White guys), with only token representation of other communities. There is a time and place for the classics, to be sure, but many students will be more engaged by texts that are relevant and relatable to them. I know it’s

Leila Hobbs May 24, 2022

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Using Procedural Writing to Build a Healthy Classroom Community

It might seem like an unusual combo, but I love using procedural writing to build classroom community. Intrigued? Let me show you how! Teaching procedural writing is a great way to build student writing skills AND develop a strong classroom community. The “how-to” format allows students to become the experts, and you can sit back and enjoy. Note: If you’re looking for nonfiction writing activities in a different format, check out this post on teaching personal narrative writing 🙂 What is a procedural format? You can basically break procedural writing into an introduction, steps in a process, and a conclusion. It is easy to engage students in the procedural format because there are TONS of engaging examples out there: makeup tutorials, crafting TikToks, and video game walkthroughs. If your students are on the internet at

Danielle Hall May 17, 2022

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Using Music In the Classroom to Boost Engagement

Using music in the classroom has countless benefits. This post has song suggestions, teaching tips, ready-to-use resources, and much more! How does music connect with ELA? Think about your favorite song. How many elements of literature are present in the lyrics? Rhyme and meter are obviously connections, but many of my favorite songs also utilize characterization, symbolism, irony (no, not THAT song about irony), metaphor, and figurative language. Even instrumental music can be related to ELA concepts! Many students might be familiar with “Peter and the Wolf” by Sergei Prokofiev, a piece that is commonly used to introduce children to the different instruments of the orchestra. The characters of the story are represented by different instruments (e.g. the Wolf is represented by the french horn, the hunters by timpani, and my personal favorite, the duck

Danielle Hall May 10, 2022

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5 Short Stories to Celebrate AAPI Heritage Month in Secondary ELA

May is AAPI Heritage Month, so to celebrate, here are 5 short stories that will help your students connect with and appreciate AAPI cultures. Danielle here, I’m so happy to share this guest post by Joan Sung, a writer, and educator. Follow her on IG @joansungwriter and check out her shiny new website! Joan has some great short story recommendations for celebrating AAPI Heritage Month in your classroom, and I have some tips for how to make sure your curriculum is inclusive, year-round. Maybe you’re already working toward creating an inclusive classroom library, here’s a free tool to find any representation gaps in the collection. You can also check out my always-growing, mega list of diverse texts for Secondary ELA. Okay, that’s enough from me, enjoy Joan’s post: 5 Short Stories to Celebrate AAPI Heritage

Joan Sung May 3, 2022

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Fun Classroom Games – Team Trivia for ELA

Looking for some fun, new classroom games? This post will show you how to play Team Trivia in ELA, & even give you a free week of questions! If you’re looking for classroom games to play as a group, team trivia should definitely be on your list! Trivia is such a low-stakes way to get kids thinking critically and working collaboratively. How do you do trivia in the classroom? After years of playing pub trivia with my friends, I’ve come up with a surefire way to get that same energy in the classroom. I want my classroom games to be fun and competitive, even as students build ELA skills. Here are some basic principles: 1. Students work best in groups of 3-4 This is the ideal number to make sure everyone can participate and have

Danielle Hall April 26, 2022

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Teaching ELA Concepts with Short Stories

Need inspiration? This post has all of my tips and tricks for teaching ELA concepts like characterization, setting, symbolism, and much more! Over the past year, I’ve been working on a series of posts dedicated to teaching ELA concepts with short stories. Since the first post is from January 2021, I decided to assemble all nine of them in one convenient place, for easy reading and bookmarking 🙂 Teaching ELA Concepts with Short Stories Teaching Symbolism with Short Stories This post also contains a FREE resource for teaching symbolism that your students will love 🙂 Teaching Setting with Short Stories From a futuristic hospital to the inside of a ’67 Chevy Impala, to the planet Venus, this wide variety of settings will help keep students engaged. Teaching Figurative Language with Short Stories This post covers

Leila Hobbs April 19, 2022

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5 International Texts to Promote Diversity In the Classroom

One tool for promoting diversity in the classroom is using texts by international authors. Here are 5 texts from around the world your students will love! Note: This is a guest post, written by Abena. She’s a writer and educator who focuses on promoting diversity in the classroom. Check out her blog, DiversityInMind, and follow her on Instagram @diversity_in_mind. Now, enjoy her text recommendations! What is Cultural Diversity In the Classroom? When I taught in the UK, texts from other cultures were part of the curriculum. Often, this meant British-Africa, British-Asian, and so on. It felt like minority cultures were only being validated in part because of their relation to ‘Britishness’ rather than their own individual cultural experiences. (I see this reflected in diverse book lists from other places, like the USA, too.) As time

Abena April 13, 2022

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12 YA Dystopian Novels for the ELA Classroom

Whether you’re planning a lit circle or you need classroom library recs, I’ve got you covered with this list of YA dystopian novels. Last week, I blogged about how to conduct a Dystopian Literature Circle in your classroom, and as promised, here are my recommendations of YA dystopian novels: Note: If you decide to purchase any of these books for your classroom, please consider using my Bookshop affiliate list. Bookshop’s mission is supporting independent bookstores, and as an affiliate, I receive a small percentage that helps with blog upkeep 🙂 Dystopian Novels for Literature Circles and Beyond: The Program by Suzanne Young Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone. With suicide now an international epidemic, one outburst could land her in The Program, the only proven course of treatment. Sloane’s parents have

Danielle Hall April 5, 2022

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Dystopian Literature Circles in Secondary ELA

Want to have a dystopian literature circle in your classroom? Let me plan it for you! This post has book recs and a step-by-step guide. Students love dystopian literature, and there’s an endless amount of quality texts covering different themes. That’s why I love to do dystopian literature circles with my students. This allows us to compare themes across different settings and characters. If you haven’t tried literature circles in high school, I’ll share some tips about getting started with those as well. Introduction to Dystopian Literature Before we ever start literature circles, we come together as a class and create a common understanding of what dystopian literature is. We discuss four types of control present in dystopian novels: Corporate (Minority Report) Bureaucratic (1984) Technological (The Matrix) Ideological/Religious (The Handmaid’s Tale) As we’re discussing these

Danielle Hall March 29, 2022

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10 Video Games to Use in Secondary ELA

Video games can be helpful tools to help students gain a deeper understanding of literature. Here are 10 video games to use in Secondary ELA. Using video games for mentor texts is a great way to connect with students who are reluctant to analyze elements of literature. Since so many students already love video games, these texts are an excellent way to leverage their interests. Using video games in the classroom You can harness the goodness and power of video games without turning your classroom into a gaming den. In the blurbs below, I recommend specific scenes you can share. I also make recommendations for larger projects students could do if they’re able to play at home. Video games are often fully developed stories with long cinematic moments and complex plots. Even in combat and

Danielle Hall March 22, 2022

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Strengthening Public Speaking Skills with Children’s Books

A low-stress (and low-cost!) way to help students build their public speaking skills is by using children’s books. Learn how in this post! One way to lower the pressure of teaching public speaking skills online or in the classroom is by using children’s books as inspiration. Middle and high schoolers will become much more confident with this approach to public speaking. Why are children’s books great for middle and high schoolers? Students can read them in a class period and get to work If they want to choose a different text, there’s not a ton of lost time Students can connect to the story AND to the artwork Teaching Public Speaking Skills I’ve been teaching public speaking to 8th and 9th graders for a long time now, and I can tell you that the number

Danielle Hall March 8, 2022

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Teaching Lamb to the Slaughter

Looking for new ways to use this classic short story? I’m sharing tips and activities I’ve learned while teaching Lamb to the Slaughter. Usually, I’m all about finding contemporary short stories to teach in middle and high school. However, one classic short story my students adore is Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter.” In Lamb to the Slaughter, Mrs. Maloney is a pregnant housewife whose husband announces he wants a divorce. In a stupor, she gets a frozen leg of lamb out of the freezer for their dinner, but ends up bashing him over the head with it. The police come to investigate and she plays innocent. Then, she insists they stay for dinner (it’s lamb!). Lamb to the Slaughter pre-reading activities One of my students’ favorite activities of the year is the pre-reading activity

Danielle Hall March 1, 2022

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Ideas for Teaching Braiding Sweetgrass

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer is part poetry, part memoir, and part ecological treatise. Here are some ideas for teaching Braiding Sweetgrass in excerpts. “Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness.” -from Braiding Sweetgrass I’m a high school English teacher. I’ve taught both mythology and American literature and have used Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer as a tool for teaching different concepts in both classes. Before I begin: it is incorrect to call Indigenous stories “mythology” and I acknowledged that in my teaching of the course. We cannot refer to a group of people’s deeply held beliefs as mythology. Hence, I prefer the

Victoria C February 22, 2022

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5 Perfect Short Texts for Teaching Characterization in Literature

Looking for short stories (and other short texts) you can use to teach characterization in literature? This post is for you! Teaching Characterization in Literature Are you tired of teaching the same short stories over and over? Today I’m sharing 5 texts – four contemporary and one classic – that you and your students will love. Analyzing characterization in literature is a vital part of understanding an author’s purpose, and one tool I love to use when teaching characterization is interactive notebooks. I even have a resource in my store dedicated to teaching characterization with interactive notebooks! Help your students confidently analyze characters in any novel. This resource uses video clips, fairy tales, and a, editable PowerPoint to introduce students to the concept of character analysis. Students finish with an analytical essay about a character

Danielle Hall February 15, 2022

6 Song-Inspired Black History Month Activities in ELA

Music is a great way to connect with students! These Black History Month activities explore history, social justice, cultural lenses, & more. Music in the classroom is not only highly engaging for students. It’s also great for helping students connect emotionally with people and cultures that have different perspectives from them. These lyrics alone provide lessons on countless poetic devices and ELA concepts, but I have paired an extension activity with each song to help students dig deeper. Songs to teach for Black History Month “For Women” by Talib Kweli “She tried to get it where she fit in, On that American Dream mission paid tuition, For the receipt to find out her history was missing and started flippin’, Seeing the world through very different eyes.” In this song, Kweli pulls inspiration from “Four Women”

Leila Hobbs February 8, 2022

a photo of the book Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes, lying on top of a weeking planner. At the top there is a white banner that says "Teaching Ideas for Bronx Masquerade" in pink text.

Why I Love Teaching Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes

In this post, I share tips, ideas, & resources for teaching Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes. My students love this book – yours will too 🙂 In Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes, high school narrators explore themes of identity, family, and community at the new Open “Mike” Friday in Mr. Ward’s class. Each chapter includes a prose section that reads like a journal entry *and* the narrator’s slam poem. In this post, I’ll be sharing some ideas for teaching Bronx Masquerade that helped me *and* my students. Why do I love Teaching Bronx Masquerade? As I’ve mentioned before on Instagram and the blog, I had a rough first year of teaching. I was working 70 hours a week and wasn’t sure it was a good fit for me. My school was highly segregated because of a

Danielle Hall February 1, 2022

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Teaching Conflict in Literature with Short Stories

Looking for tips & text recommendations for teaching conflict in literature? This post has stories & extension activities to engage students! In a continuation of my series on teaching literary elements, today I’m sharing ideas for teaching conflict in literature. While conflict is sometimes easy to identify, it can be harder for students to determine *how* an author creates and heightens conflict using setting, characterization, and tone. I find that using a variety of shorter examples, rather than teaching, say, a novel or a play, helps students to stay engaged. So with no further ado, here are 5 short texts you can use for teaching conflict. Short Stories for Teaching Conflict in Literature “Say Yes” by Tobias Wolff (MS/HS) In this short story, the Person vs. Person conflict happens between a husband and wife. While washing

Leila Hobbs January 25, 2022

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