81. The Many Layers of Teaching ELA

Brittany 0:00

Welcome back to the teaching toolbox, where we unpack all things education with a dash of humor and a whole lot of practicality. I'm Brittany, and today we are dusting off the wonderfully complex world of teaching English language arts, other noise known as ELA. Ah, yes, the subject that has it all: novels, grammar drills, essays, creative writing, spelling lists, and that classic moment when a student asks, Why do I need to know what a gerund is? If I had $1 for every time I heard that I'd be able to retire next week,

Ellie 1:04

if only.

Brittany 1:07

But seriously, ela isn't just about reading books and writing essays. It's about developing critical thinking, creativity, and communication skills that students will use for life. And of course, I'm joined by my fantastic co host, Ellie.

Ellie 1:25

Hello. Today we're breaking it down into all the different aspects of teaching ELA, novel studies, grammar, creative writing, formal essays, all those fun things Brittany just talked about.

Brittany 1:36

So let's jump right in with novel studies, a staple in any ELA classroom.

Ellie 1:44

Okay, we love novel studies. Students sometimes love them, but they can be tricky to manage.

Brittany 1:50

For sure, the key is choosing the right book for your class. You want something engaging but also challenging enough to promote the deep discussions and the critical thinking. You want something that the girls will like and get into, but you want something the boys won't be bored with. It's a real tough challenge sometimes to pick a book, and let's be real. Sometimes even the best books can fall flat if we don't get creative with how we teach them.

Ellie 2:19

Absolutely, and that's where different teaching strategies come. In. Literature circles, for example, allow students to take on roles such as discussion leader, summarizer, or vocabulary finder, which helps keep them engaged and accountable. Now, I've made maybe a little bit extra work for myself when we did literature circles, because I would assign a different book to every group of students. So I might have a group of six students, and I would do a different book for all of them. Or if one book was really popular and we had enough copies, then two groups might do the same one. So I would do like a survey, share what the books were about, do a survey, let them vote on their top three choices, and then, depending on the reading level, I might give them their first or second or third choice. So if I knew that their first choice was a little going to be a little too challenging for them, then I might give them their second choice, because I tried to choose books that were on a little bit different level. And so we did those, I don't want to say all the time, but almost all the time, almost all year long. So they were a huge part of my classroom. And we had a very structured group time with some of the roles that we mentioned. We had specific response questions to choose from that address the various story elements. And then we had, like, these cubes that I made, and they would roll those cubes to land on specific discussion topics, and they always ended up their session by reading aloud the beginning of the next day's assignment. So we make sure we're doing some read aloud in there. And I loved those groups. So I would rotate and go from group to group to group every day, starting with a different group each day, and most of the students really seem to enjoy them, too.

Brittany 4:04

Wow, that's impressive that you were maintaining 4, 5, 6, different books all at the same time.

Ellie 4:11

Fortunately, most of the time there was an assistant in the classroom, so she could also float and monitor and answer questions if I was with a group. So that was beneficial, for sure, but I loved that.

Brittany 4:23

Yeah, I usually did the same book for the entire class, but then broke them into groups based on their reading levels, and then would have them kind of do more like a center rotation through where they might have a reading time together, where they're working on, like, some questions or answers and that type of thing, and reading for the next day. And then they might work with me for a little bit on some deeper questions, and they might do another center activity with the para.

Ellie 4:57

And then we always did, like, a read aloud for the whole class, like I would have another book going most of the time, that would be either our beginning of class or ending of class that we would read, you know, 5, 10 minutes or whatever, of a book or half an hour if I got off track.

Brittany 5:14

I will get on a soapbox about read alouds. So maybe that'll have to be another story episode.

Ellie 5:21

All right, so the next will be Brittany's soapbox.

Brittany 5:26

Reacer's Theater is another great way to bring a text to life, assigning roles and having students act out scenes not only boosts engagement, but also helps with fluency and comprehension. And if you remember, back in episode 39 we talked about drama integration and readers theater with Deb.

Ellie 5:46

Yeah, that was a great episode. Project based learning is another fantastic tool. Instead of just answering comprehension questions, students could create a book trailer, design a board game based on the novel, or even write an alternate ending.

Brittany 5:58

And when it comes to structuring a novel study, both whole group and small group instruction have their place. Whole group discussions help model analytical thinking, allowing for shared insights, while small group centers can offer differentiated learning experiences. One group might focus on vocabulary, another on character analysis, and another on thematic connections.

Ellie 6:23

Yeah, I think the key is variety. Mixing up how we approach novel studies keeps students engaged and helps them build a deeper understanding of the text. And integrating different writing styles, like journal reflections or character letters, things like that, can really help to enhance comprehension. And so that leads us on to other things like spelling and grammar. Grammar seems to be the part of ELA that students typically either love or love to hate. But it's it's necessary. The trick is making it relevant and engaging. I used to use a daily partner language as a huge chunk of my grammar instruction. So this kind of came from when I first started teaching way back we had daily oral language. Did you have that?

Brittany 7:11

Yes, we did.

Ellie 7:12

But my students really didn't get as much out of it as I wanted them to, mostly because even though they corrected the sentences, they weren't all engaged. It would be like this person comes up to the board. We had the sentences on the board and they would make the correction, but all the people who weren't making corrections may not have been paying as close attention as they needed to.

Brittany 7:31

I agree.

Ellie 7:32

Yeah. So over the years, I changed the daily oral language practice to my own version, and it still included correcting only two sentences a day, but students worked on those sentences, first independently, like I typed them up and put them on half - on sheets of paper, and each student would get a half sheet of paper, and they would independently correct their sentences, and then they would get together with a partner. And for each of those two sentences, one student would basically be the teacher, and would either confirm or correct their partner's answers as they reviewed the sentence corrections. And then they would switch so all students were actively engaged in all the time. Like both sentences, they were actively engaged. They didn't have any possible way to not be because they had to be interacting with their partner the entire time. And then I also had students identify parts of speech in the sentences. So I would on my list, have all of the parts of speech, all of the nouns, verbs, whatever, in this sentence. And the student who was the teacher had that list, and then the other student had to identify them, and their partner would confirm or correct the parts of speech. So it was Daily Practice for punctuation, capitalization, subject verb agreement, all of those, plus parts of speech. And students did so well with this as far as understanding writing conventions and grammar. I feel like it was one of the best things I ever did with my ELA students.

Brittany 8:59

It sounds amazing, especially compared to the daily oral language program, which was just so boring. Yeah, we did Shirley grammar, which involved a lot of sing song and chants, and that helped the kids kind of get into it more, because they got to sing and chant and clap and that sort of thing. But yeah, grammar was not, was not as strong contender as one of their favorite subjects. But gamifying grammar practice can work wonders. You could have sentence scrambles, escape room challenges, anything to make it interactive. And let's not forget spelling. In my experience, we almost always use traditional spelling lists, but I would prefer teaching spelling through word study and vocabulary activities. It's more meaningful when students understand word patterns, rather than just memorizing random lists of 20, 30 words.

Ellie 9:56

I agree. When we're spelling words, we eventually use them in sentences. So let's talk about some short impromptu writing that we would use for our spelling and our sentences. Sometimes you just need to get pencils moving for writing, and that's where short impromptu writing comes in. I loved using quick writes at the beginning of class, or sometimes even at the end of class, if I was giving them a short amount of time, giving them a prompt and five minutes to write whatever comes to mind, no pressure, just write anything, be creative. And those were also really quick to grade, just to get a super quick snapshot of their word choice or their sentence structure or organization of a paragraph, that kind of thing.

Yeah, it's a great way to build fluency and confidence in writing as well. Plus, it's perfect for brainstorming before a longer assignment. And speaking of longer assignments

ooh, we've got some fun longer assignments like creative writing assignments. This is where students can let their imaginations run wild, whether it's short stories, poetry, personal narratives, creative writing gives students the chance to develop their voice. This was another fun area for my language arts classes. Students kept a writing journal that had various fun prompts, like, if you could make it rain, anything except rain what would it be? Who would love this rain? How would it be good for the environment? Or how would it be bad for the environment? Like, if it rained gum drops instead of rain? How would that affect things? How would the animals like that? How would you like that? Or something like, if someone offered you a million dollars to stand in a pit with poisonous snakes for three minutes, would you do it? Give three reasons why or why not. Some of the prompts were shorter, and I would use them as quick writes, while I'd give more time for other prompts or for free writing or writing about a topic from lists that students had generated for themselves.

And if you're looking for prompts like that, I just remembered that I have about a year's worth of prompts available in my store. I call them discussion starters, but could they could definitely be used as writing prompts.

Absolutely I have like this booklet in my store, too.

cool.

We'll put both of those in the show notes. And

And the best part about this kind of writing is there's no single right answer. I used to go through my parents' magazines when visiting and rip out large pretty pictures or from calendars. And I'd also put them on construction paper and then laminate them, and then I'd hand them out and ask kids to write a story on whatever they thought was going on in the picture. That used to be one of the best ways to do creative writing.

Yeah we did that too. Oh, can I add another thing,

of course.

So we used to also do this squiggle writing. So I don't know if people do the squiggle writing or not, but it was based I think we started this when I was teaching second grade, and then I carried it through to sixth grade, and sixth graders loved it too. So you basically just draw some type of line on a paper. It can be curvy, or it can, you know, be pointy, whatever, but just kind of a line, and then you copy that and give the line to students, and they draw whatever they see there, and then they write a story about it. So that was always fun. They enjoyed that.

cool. Yeah, we like doing group writing, especially around the holidays, we would have everybody get a piece of paper, and then whoever's paper it was, they would write the first sentence, and then we would pass it and write a second sentence, and pass it and write a third sentence, and then they would have a story that hopefully made some sense, because they would try to keep making it make sense, but it was usually quite interesting and fun to read. I also love using writing prompts with a twist, like write a fairy tale from the villain's perspective, or write how the wolf felt in the Little Red Riding Hood. And then one other thing you can do is incorporate peer feedback, so you can have students read to each other their stories and give feedback to one another, so that they can see how kids feel about their writing as well.

That just reminded me that we used to write from a different perspective, but we always used the book about the three little pigs and the Big Bad Wolf, from the wolf's perspective. I don't remember who wrote that book, but that was a fun one.

I have that,

yeah, I do too, somewhere falling apart, but it's a good one.

But inevitably, we also have to teach the more structured side of writing, which leads us to

essays, research papers, persuasive letters, these are the assignments that really push students to organize their thoughts and build strong arguments.

Teaching formal writing can be daunting, but breaking it down, step by step makes it manageable. Outlining. drafting, revising, editing. I have a couple resources, one on national parks and one on a country of the world that break down how to dissect and teach each of the concepts, as well as bibliographies and business letters, and we'll link those in the show notes. But what I found is that you have to go much slower and much more step by step than you might realize

Absolutely. And then we have timed writing assignments. Timed writing if you ever do that can be so stressful for students, but practicing it in low stake settings helps. I like to start with 10 minute mini essays to build endurance. And so this is helpful for them when they end up in the testing situation where they have to finish an essay or an explanation on that test in a short amount of time. Giving them that practice is super helpful.

Yeah. And balancing that with untimed writing opportunities like research papers or creative writing, where students can really take their time is key. Giving students a mix of structured and free form writing experiences will set them up for success.

All right. Well, we have covered a lot today, novel studies, grammar, spelling, creative writing, formal essays,

pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. ELA is such a broad subject, but that's what makes it exciting. There's something for every learner. We'd love to hear from you, what's your favorite way to teach ELA? What would you like to hear more about? What tools do you need for your teaching toolbox? Let us know on social media or in the comments.

Thanks for hanging out with us today on the teaching toolbox. Be sure to subscribe and tune in next time for more tips and teacher talk.

Until then, keep inspiring those young minds.