Language Arts Education Articles for Teachers - Page 12

An essential literacy skill lesson I like to include in my first few weeks of instruction is how to appropriately respond to literature. My sixth grade students tend to write what they think is the "right answer", or the answer I want to read. My goal in having students respond to what they are r...

  By the time students enter the sixth grade they generally understand the main concept of characterization in literature. The learning objective then translates into students being able to analyze the techniques that authors utilize in order to describe characters in a story. There are nume...

By the time students arrive in sixth grade, they are already familiar with the concept of story elements, and are now required to use and expand their knowledge.  For example, students are required not only to identify, but to explain and describe the importance of setting in a story, as wel...

For both teachers and students, the beginning of the school year can be an exciting and challenging time of the year. Teachers prepare for students they have not met, and students are imagining a year of experiences that could be either negative, positive, or both. The way in which teachers choos...

In my experience as a middle school teacher I've found that very few students walk into my classroom without something to say, something they want to say, or something that they heard that they want to share. As a language arts teacher, I view a student's social network as a&n...

State curriculum standards often say that students must be able to interpret simile and metaphor in order to understand new uses of words and phrases in text. While not all states assign this to the sixth grade curriculum, as my state Ohio does, students of every age are expected to und...

  At the beginning of the school year I always look forward to meeting my new students, and I love to do so through our writer's notebooks. As enthusiastic as I am to begin our writing journey, I can't help but anticipate the resounding "ughh" that will surely be the response as I introduce ...

A few years ago, the data from my school district's state assessments revealed that our students excelled at comprehending, summarizing, analyzing, and writing fiction. The data also revealed that those same students showed difficulty in performing the same tasks when analyzing nonfiction. T...

When I begin teaching students about science fiction, I start by asking the following question -What are the differences between Natalie Babbitt's "Tuck Everlasting" and Lois Lowry's "The Giver"? The responses are always interesting, and few address genre. My students often view fantasy, and...