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.

The phrase that I have heard so many times in meetings and throughout professional developments is: “We have to stop going a mile wide and an inch deep.” I will often keep track of how many times I hear this in meetings on a sticky note. Not kidding. The alternative to this is of course that we need to be focusing on an inch-wide worth material while going a mile deep in the quest to find mastery. As this idiom relates to teaching, secondary English Language Arts teachers have the particular problem of being tasked with teaching both reading and writing in small blocks of class time. Here are some particular questions I often get on the blog, in my classroom, and the questions I ask myself on days when I am pulling my own hair out:

How do I fit it all in?

What gets left out if I can’t do it all?

How am I building readers AND writers?

Is reading more important than writing?

Does my curriculum guide provide that balance of reading and writing for me?

These are just a few questions that cause any ELA teacher to pause and reflect and perhaps think, “how is this job even possible.” My brain often looks like a tangled Pinterest feed with ideas about strategies and resources.  I don’t have any hard answers here. I just want to provide how I attempt to “fit it all” into my blocks of class time each day, week, and year. I have many things I love and will continue to do, and I have things that I try out all the time. This goes back to my non-negotiables because I have things that I will always continue to do because I can visually see learning taking place in front of me, and I have things I try to improve on all the time. My goal with this post is NOT to try to say what the correct strategies are for “fitting it all in,” but simply offer a way one teacher is doing it in the spirit of collaboration and sanity. 

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.

I have been using generative writing in the writing workshop in my middle school classroom for years. However, I have been using it mainly only in ONE genre of writing: personal narrative writing. After attending a National Writing Project cohort training for C3WP (College, Career, and Community Writers Program), I realized that generative writing really is at the heart of all writer’s workshops because it uses the students’ interests and personal experiences to create the topics, provide the organization, and make the connections that are so necessary for engagement and comprehension. The answer to most things in education is coming back to the relationships and rapport we establish with our students, but these ideas are not new.

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.

I am not sure what I did before warm-ups. I think what I did before warm-ups when I was first starting out was make a warm-up activity that was catered to each and every lesson. As a new teacher, this was exhausting. After doing some research a couple of summers ago, I moved to canned warm-ups, and I have loved every minute of them. What I mean by canned warm-ups is that each day has a theme and each week uses a specific form. In other terms, there is a plan. 

Observation #1: This writing every day thing is more difficult than imagined. Even if it is a quick write. 

Observation #2: I am to the part of the school year where I am evaluating on a macro level what strategies and routines are working...and which ones are not. 

One of the changes I made this year was to routine paragraph warm-ups. I was sitting in a professional development in August, and the facilitator asked the question, "who uses warm-ups to start class?" I had decided to change, but the overwhelming majority of people do use warm-ups. My question, as a person who never used warm-ups and had anticipatory sets for all lessons for each day, I was curious as to what was working and what was not. Many people use Daily 5, etc. However, I was interested in having all students write a paragraph-no ifs, ands, buts, about it. 5-7 sentences is the expectation for the daily warm-up, and all students, I repeat, all students are hitting this benchmark at this point in the school year. Routine paragraphs are expected routines on a given thematic concept for each day. They involve note-taking, opinion, or critical-thinking.

I started to write this post and something distracted me. I looked at my calendar and then back to my blog post. Calendar-blog-calendar-blog. Where did the month of May go? I am amazed at the utter loss of time and also trying to balance that feeling that almost all teachers I know get in the month of May. You know the feeling. We look at each other with empathy. We make jokes. We give words of wisdom on social media and to each other in person. We try to see the light at the end of the tunnel that is summer. However, especially with state testing in May for many of us, it can get difficult to find joy.