Katie Caprino offers three ideas for using Zillah Bethell’s YA novel The Shark Caller to engage your middle grades ELA students in social emotional learning. Caprino’s activities build on how the young characters interact as they face the impact of deaths in their families.
Literacy champions Lynne Dorfman and Aileen Hower join children’s author Frank Murphy in a frank, well-informed review of the book banning controversy. Students need books that help them see themselves and understand others. “The opposite of censorship is intellectual freedom.”
Articles / Civics and Current Events / Media Literacy
by MiddleWeb · Published 09/25/2022 · Last modified 07/31/2023
As disinformation proliferates, schools need a better solution than perfunctory media literacy education, say these digital citizenship advocates. When students achieve full “media fluency,” they will not only understand disinformation exists but have the tools to outflank it, write McCusker, Irvan and Driscoll.
Culturally Responsive Teaching in Gifted Education is an essay collection addressing a variety of populations and will benefit all students, says History and ELA teacher Megan Kelly. She highlights three, including “Promoting Racism: Through the Eyes of a Black Mother.”
Many school problems are social at their core. When teachers and counselors give students a leadership role in normalizing the problems – making them accessible and resolvable – the community culture improves for everyone, says national counseling leader Jean Peterson.
Building Community / Wide Open Learning
by Megan Kelly · Published 09/19/2022 · Last modified 07/11/2024
With the goal of having new middle school students feel seen as individuals while also feeling like a part of something bigger, Megan Kelly organized group activities for all the students across her sixth grade team. The games can be expanded or contracted to fit your time.
Content Learning / The Unstoppable ML Teacher
by Tan Huynh · Published 09/18/2022 · Last modified 01/26/2023
Teaching academic content is less about receiving students who are ready to learn and more about creating conditions to support learning. Tan Huynh shares a geography lesson he designed to meet three conditions multilinguals need to learn content and language simultaneously.
Barry Gilmore’s Plagiarism: A How-Not-To Guide for Students helps learners understand the motivation behind plagiarism and discusses ways to avoid it in both academic and employment settings. Eighth grade teacher Erin Corrigan-Smith also recommends the teacher’s edition.
When Stephanie Farley coaxes her students into a good frame of mind – happy, relaxed, confident – they learn more, just as positivity research predicts. Join her as she shares 10 joy-inducing methods – including dogs – and suggests ways to reach across content.
Lisa Eickholdt and Patty Vitale-Reilly’s favorite student collaboration is the Writing Club – an opportunity for kids to write in authentic, engaging, and creative ways. They prepare a foundation for this work with read-alouds, feedback structures, partnering activities, and more.
