Any time there is a transition from being on a break from work back to the everyday routine, it is a struggle. However, this past transition from winter break to teaching in January seemed a little tougher than usual. My students seemed off, I seemed off, and I had to plan for a sub day in the middle of the week due to a school improvement conference I had to attend. The theme for the week was “off.” There are signs of burnout that creep in that sometimes have nothing to do with being on a break or not. Simply, teachers are asked to do all things at all times, and this causes mindset burnout-even if they are just coming off of a break. There are lots of symptoms, but I find that my day-to-day resiliency to handle all of my teacher tasks begins to suffer when I feel burnout settle into my mindset. it is the moment when making a to-do list even seems overwhelming.

For example, I was making the comment to my husband one night this past week:

“I feel like I could work for another 2-3 hours tonight, and I still would not be caught up. I’m never caught up.”

Some teachers that are part of the #mytimeismyown movement on social media, or are trying to prioritize their time outside of the walls of teaching, may have just cringed. But, we all have been there. I don’t want to work at home, but the demands of the job continue to demand time. I recently got 100 graphic novels awarded to my classroom through a grant. I would not have received those materials if I had not given up time outside of the usual to write the grant, present the grant, and then follow through on plans for the new materials. The real question here is how do we set limits? Because the truth is, teachers are trying as hard as they can.

When that beautiful time of year rolls around to teach the argumentative essay to your middle school students, you might find yourself crinkling your nose and thinking, “Oh boy, let’s just get through this.” 

I don’t blame you! 

Teaching the argumentative essay is no easy feat. You aren’t just teaching students the flow and structure of writing, but you are also teaching them how to research, evaluate evidence, make a claim, argue, convince, and write in a formal style. Many of these skills might be new to your students, so it is important to go slow, keep it simple, and make it very clear. 

Today we are going to be looking at 5 tips and tricks to help you teach the argumentative essay to your students in a fun, clear, and simple way!

1. Mentor Texts are Golden

2. Structure is Everything

3. Research is Key 

4. The Little Details Matter

5. Checklists are a Must

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.

What a year this has been! 2019 is coming to a close tomorrow with New Year’s Eve, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for sharing this blog space with me throughout the past year. In January 2017, I started Writing Mindset as a way to reflect on teaching. Now, I focus on the ability to not only reflect on teaching, but to also constantly share ideas and learn from others. This blog has been and continues to become a passion project that is an outlet for my learning through teaching. It is also a space that is teaching me so many things. I am always in the role of a student when I am working on Writing Mindset. What I love most about education is trying new ideas and learning new strategies as ways to give and receive information. I am a Questioner, but more so, I am a person who loves to reflect on what went well and the things that did not go so well in my classroom and in life. 2019 was a rollercoaster of reflection. I was awarded the Michigan Council of Teachers of English Middle School Teacher of the Year, I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone by presenting at conferences, and with 48 total blog posts in 2019, I wrote more than any other year so far on the blog. I lend that to being wildly passionate about mentor texts, but I also feel like I am getting closer to why this blog exists in the first place. Writing Mindset is a way to use writing to access mindfulness, mindset, and overall wellness. I can see 2020 becoming a year when I focus more on the whole teacher. This includes the mental, physical, emotional, and intellectual health of anybody in education. Our wellness is an access point to more complex issues in education. As I said in the winter break post recently, our health is their health. Too many of us are unhappy, and too many of us are unhealthy. I can’t wait to explore some of the ways teachers can continue to be happier and healthier in 2020.

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.

I love swapping weekly routines with teachers. It shows what we value and what we prioritize for each day of teaching. I talked about my planning process in my back-to-school bullet journal post in August, but this plan can be a candidate for change based on the group of students each year. I always like to review my weekly routine each year when I do my reading each summer. Reflecting on these practices is one of the ways that I like to feed my own creativity and keep my teaching practices fresh for students. I know teachers always like to have established routines “that work,” but I would argue that the new things we try to keep our student-minds working like new. I got into teaching because learning was something that appealed to me; the nature of the weekly routine is something that begs to be refined over and over.

Let’s #swaproutines. I would love to know how your classroom runs and is organized with different activities and lessons.

I think all new English teachers love the idea of the novel study. I did. I still do. However, I have picked up some skills and strategies along the way that have made my novel units much more enjoyable for both me and my students. In my first year of teaching in 2010, I was instructed by my district pacing guide to teaching Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor to my sixth-grade students. I was at the district alternative middle school that involved a heavily transient population that struggled with reading. I think we studied that book for almost 3 months because we couldn’t move as a group through the novel. I had an idea in my head, I wanted to finish the idea to the end, and I was determined to manifest that moment of talking about a book happen in my first-year classroom. It didn’t happen. Now, it is a story I tell my pre-service teachers when they come into my room to observe my classroom during novel units. A novel study should never be a tool for torture.

I still teach Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; however, my novel units are designed completely different from when I started teaching. I also know when it is okay to give up on something if it is not working. No teacher I know wants to be pegged as a “book quitter,” but there are times when we, as teachers, need to quit books, practice, and strategies that we have been doing to discover a deeper level of learning on the other side. Perhaps one of the best parts about being a teacher of English is the infamous novel study unit. From choosing books to share with students to figuring out how to shape the ins and outs of each day of class, the novel unit remains a joy to teach and a complicated mess. This post will walk you through all the things I think about when it comes to teaching a novel to a group of students. I also throw in some examples at the end of the post for you to check out in both general and accelerated classes.

I should warn you now that the underlying theme of this post is that teaching is tough, and while we all know this we have to keep encouraging each other to thwart off burnout and exhaustion. My goal is to always find ways and different approaches to making this fight easier year after year. It is interesting to me that I will research teacher books, listen to podcasts, study teacher websites, go to conferences, and then realize that sometimes the answer is where I’ve known it has been all along. It’s been with me. Self-care has always sounded corny to me. But, if you break self-care down into you must literally take care of your own self to flourish. Then, self-care does not seem unreasonable or indulgent. Self-care sounds like a buzzword, but it is a necessity in all aspects in order to keep teaching in classrooms year after year.

Teachers must build themselves physically, intellectually, emotionally, and mentally to continue to go back into their classrooms each day. Many of the reasons in this post have become my “whys” for when I step onto my yoga mat or push myself in a workout for 10 more minutes. I originally posted this almost two years ago in January 2018 when the opportune time to realize that we needed to make “resolutions” or changes was upon each of us again. I started rethinking exercise in October of this school year. While I started a draft of this post, and I have intentionally not wanted to revise and redraft because of the utter fear of holding myself accountable. Also, a certain aspect of imposter syndrome sets in. I feel like I have little expertise in trying to get “in shape” or follow any really fitness regimen. However, I have tons of experience in burnout and feeling like I can’t do another lesson plan. I have always been a teacher and a student of learning, but we all have things that we aren’t naturally good at-and being a student at those things is what matters.

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. 

The title of this post isn’t serious. I know you are tired. If you are teaching, you perhaps have hit a wall called the “November Blues.” These are the feelings you get waiting on Thanksgiving Break. Everything is starting to settle down. For me, the first round of testing is done, routines are established, the first round of parent-teacher conferences are over, and the second set of grades will be due soon. The expectation of who we are in my classroom is going strong. There is still work to do in terms of lifting literacy, inspiring new thoughts, and building capacity for compassion, but we will get there. While November is when everything starts feeling stable, it is also the first time in the year when I often suffer from “paralysis of the mind” or teacher burnout. 

These two weeks focus on adding adjectives and snapshots in narrative writing using the mentor texts Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Both of these lessons build on each other as I first teach using adjectives in writing, and then we get some experience making snapshots in regards to characters and setting. A snapshot is a moment in writing that provides detail in terms of character or setting. The text The Reviser’s Toolbox by Barry Lane was the first text that introduced the idea of snapshots to me, and this text remains the go-to standard for items to teach in terms of narrative, personal narrative, and memoir writing. Students often receive practice in regards to describing themselves or character, but sometimes struggle with describing a setting or character interaction. Teaching them how to add detail in narrative writing sets the stage for teaching elaboration when it comes to argumentative and informational writing in our upcoming units.

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.

Below is my acceptance speech from receiving the Michigan Council of Teachers of English Middle School Teacher of the Year Award at the fall annual conference in Lansing, MI. I so appreciate the support during the speech, and also the kind words that I received throughout the day at the conference. I would also like to thank Dr. Karen Vocke from Western Michigan University for my wonderful award introduction.

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.

I wanted to open this blog post with ramblings of how motivation can change throughout the school year, but I decided against it because we all know the deal with motivation: It does what it wants to do. It can come, and it can go. We just have to decide how to fight back against the utter lack of motivation that presents itself in our own bodies and minds and in our students looking back at us in our classrooms. It is important to note the relationships between motivation, expectations, and behavior management as we establish norms for the fall and the beginning of the year. If we understand motivation, we can troubleshoot any foreseeable classroom management issues as well. If we make our lessons engaging and root our energy and enthusiasm in our delivery, we can help students access our expectations in a variety of ways. Because according to Gretchen Rubin, we all have different tendencies towards outer and inner expectations.

I wanted to review one of Kelly Gallagher's strategies called Article of the Week that has changed the game of teaching for me. I have tried every method of homework under the sun in the past 9 years. I have tried homework menus, homework assigned on certain days, daily five homework, grammar homework, reading homework, writing homework...and the list goes on. The main method of homework that works for my students and that remains genuine is Gallagher's Article of the Week. The Article of the Week or AOW incorporates the addition of useful non-fiction resources into the classroom, and also provides students with a method of increasing their reading performance and knowledge base. Students are taught skills and purpose with annotation.  I like to assign a new focus for each trimester while doing an AOW.

My classroom is all set to begin the 2019-2020 school year. As per usual, I can make this space as cute and as functional as I want, but it really needs to the kids to make it complete. I have done some minor additions to the layout this year, but I wanted to include some of my important areas just in case anyone needed ideas for their own setup. If you want to check out last year’s setup to see any changes, feel free to head over to that tour. My mission this year was not to get sucked down the rabbit hole of classroom design, but I wanted to improve the small details of my room that I struggled with last year.