Do your students struggle to use specific word choice in their writing? The Be Specific Anchor Chart includes strategies and tips to make writing more specific. This is an increasingly important skill in the Common Core era, especially on the writing portion of the assessment. Hang this anchor chart in your room or print out and give to your students as a handout.
Good Morning,
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Only 3 weeks of instruction left until Christmas! In these final weeks, I’ve relied on A Christmas Carol to review and teach foundational literacy skills as a final review before exams. The text allows teachers to both build historical context around the Industrial Revolution and a complex text to analyze characters, language, structure, and theme, to name a few.
Lessons
I’ve highlighted two of my favorite lessons that make use of A Christmas Carol below. These lessons are aligned to Reading Literature and Writing Standards; they are scaffolded and rely on a catch and release model to help students master literacy content. There are even more lessons aligned to A Christmas Carol available on my Pinterest; visit by clicking the picture to the left.
Dynamic Character Development in A Christmas Carol
This lesson starts with a Do Now reviewing how to correctly include evidence in written response. The lesson provides a scaffolded approach to defining dynamic characters and analyzing them over the course of a text. This lesson requires the close reading of short excerpts from the play, which reinforces another foundational reading skill in TNReady/ Common Core.
Understanding Theme in A Christmas Carol
This lesson builds historical context around the setting of A Christmas Carol. Students view primary and secondary sources (embedded in this PPT) and respond in writing to prompts throughout the lesson. This lesson addresses Reading Literature and Writing Standards for TNReady and Common Core.
Middle School Writer 