Expand Your Writing: Historical Narrative Writing (By Adding Thoughts, Feelings, and Observations) Help your students incorporate Social Studies writing into your Language Arts block. Students will use this organizer to help make writing an historical narrative from a first-person point of view a piece of cake! The narrative could be adapted as a letter, as well, once the work is done on this great organizer. After students research the past, they write about what it would be like to adjust to that time period based on available resources. We are using this activity during our Westward Expansion unit. Bonus: A mostly completed sample is included to help with modeling. This organizer saves time and makes writing fun! Students work within this structure to plan out their narratives. The writing part is easy! All your students can look and feel like Superstar writers! Use in conjunction with historical research. Practice together (using sample) and have students work to fill out their organizer based on their research on the following day. Then, students can write their narratives. They can strengthen their writing through peer editing and writing a final draft. Students can use this document every time they write narratives within the unit.

Chart how writer’s craft their arguments and use evidence to support their statements. Students rate themselves before and after the activity to monitor their own growth in charting the author’s argument. This activity can be followed up with a discussion on whether the author was successful in convincing the audience and brainstorming about how the argument could have been strengthened. This activity helps students to analyze their own and/or a peer’s writing

This living things field guide can be used as the culminating activity for a living things unit or for a simple research project on living things, habitats, interdependence, and survival needs. Students’ “Pokedecks” entries could be one page in a classroom created field guide focused on a specific ecosystem, or each team could create their own field guide and “battle” the animals they have collected. This activity is such a fun way to “catch them all” while meeting the Standards for heredity SC.L.16.1 and interdependence SC.L.17.1 and SC.L.17.2. This could also be adapted for fictional characters. For example, if you were reading “The Giver,” you could base this on the protagonist, Jonas. In the Evolutions section, you might write naive, aware, and risk-taker as his evolutions. His weakness, could be fear, connection to family, or the community’s values. Under stats, his HP (or health) would differ based on the part of the story you used (and would need to be justified), while his attack would be strong since he has the power to cripple the entire community. The summary would include reasons the character is significant, and so on.

Check out my new product! Exciting Propaganda Posters for The Giver. Covers major emotional appeals. Make learning about argument fun! Use to engage students in discussions about propaganda, as well as the book, “The Giver.” I also use these posters as reference for student-created propaganda posters.

This “Making Inferences” PowerPoint was created to help your students practice a difficult concept in a fun way. The questions we pose can be used as discussion starters or student quickwrites. Use the images and your students’ activated background knowledge to help them draw logical conclusions and the questions to help them support their reasoning. Play the PowerPoint with the preset transitions for a quick, delightful review or slow things down for deliberate, teacher-led practice.

USE PHOTOGRAPHS TO MAKE OBSERVATIONS, UTILIZE SCHEMA, AND PRACTICE MAKING INFERENCES. Use textual evidence (photos) and personal evidence (schema) to make inferences. Examine the details to draw conclusions about the “Big Picture” in these pictures. Get 30 days of inference-making worksheets in one download!

Test for bias with your students in a fun and gross way. Students will love analyzing articles with the author’s bias criteria using real-world articles. The criteria can be used for any articles, websites, books, etc. Make learning fun!

Writing a great opinion paragraph made easier! Students practice unscrambling opinion paragraphs over the course of a week. My students were challenged, engaged, and for once, didn’t complain about writing. After practicing unscrambling and then rewriting these models, students were confidently writing text-based opinion paragraphs in the 2nd grade. Students can practice sorting these opinion paragraph exemplars (based on historical figures covered in the 2nd grade curriculum) sentence-by-sentence until they feel confident enough to write their own. Students sort the hook, opinion, reasons, supporting text evidence, and conclusion, all while learning about history. They also practice identifying linking and transition words, while collaborating with a partner (or group). The four included exemplars cover Black History, Women’s Equality, President’s Day, and Legends. Get more bang for your buck from this lesson created by a teacher with ten years experience educating both elementary and high school students.

On Meadowview Street Objective: Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges. You can learn about characters by paying attention to how they respond to events and challenges. Discuss the text evidence that shows how the characters respond to the challenge of creating a nature preserve in the story. *Using the mentor text, “On Meadowview Street,” chart the text using this document. List the character’s challenges and how she responds to them one by one as you read by citing text evidence. *Finally, draw conclusions about the character using the information to write a short response explaining your thinking.

Want a fast way to practice tone, mood, connotation, and theme… and cite evidence? This worksheet easily accompanies movie clips of your choosing and can be used as a compare/contrast graphic organizer. While watching a movie clip, prompt the students to identify the tone and whether it has a positive, negative, or neutral connotation, easily leading to a discussion about how word choice affects tone. Students then determine mood and look for evidence from the clip to support what they believe is the theme of the movie clip. Fun and fast! There is room for five movie clips.

Argument Made Easy! With this chart, make explaining argument easier. Students can connect ideas together, compare and contrast a variety of appeals and fallacies, and start creating their own “correct” examples right away. I will use this as a “cheat sheet” as we examine commercials and political posters in class. Try this and then download one of my free resources before you go. :) See how I use this resource for my The Giver: Argument Project on my blog. https://readingteacherweb.wordpress.com/2016/11/19/teaching-argument-do-i-have-to/comment-page-1/ It meets the Grade 9-10 ELA Standard for Reading for Informational Text (CC RI.9-10.8/LAFS9-10 RI.3.8) DOK Level 3: Strategic Thinking & Complex Reasoning Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.

“Danger, Earthquakes” Short Answer Quiz is a two-part quiz. Students answer part A and then find the evidence to support their answer in part B. There are five questions (inference, author’s purpose, main idea, and context clues/multiple meaning words) meant to accompany “Danger, Earthquakes.” We used this together to practice question analysis and finding the supporting evidence in the text as practice for 2nd grade quarterly exams.

FREE WRITING Assessment for 2nd GRADE. “SEEDS of CHANGE.” Writing Prompt with Essential Background for “Seeds Of Change.” Here is the background and structure your students will need to write a well thought-out response to text for “Seeds of Change.”