Bringing Elementary Ways into the Middle School Classroom

I am an elementary teacher at heart.  Before teaching middle school, I spent nearly ten years at the elementary level, which gave me my foundation in best practice. There are so many powerful things that elementary teachers naturally do in their classrooms each and every day.  This post is in celebration of elementary teachers, with the hopes that a few middle school teachers out there will bring some of the elementary ways into their classrooms.

Here are three of my favorite elementary teaching practices and why I think they would work brilliantly in middle school too!

Flexible Grouping - One of the many wonderful things about elementary teachers is how they naturally differentiate instruction in the classroom so that they can reach a range of learners in all subject areas. Teachers at the elementary level achieve differentiation by working with small groups of students all the time. Small groups can and do work at the middle school level too! Personally, I use the information that I gather through pre- and formative assessments to learn exactly which students need help with which skill. Once I have this information, I group students into homogeneous groups so that I can help meet students' individual needs.  Using the 30 minutes per week that I have set aside for independent reading time, I can pull together small groups to work on various skills. Grouping students not only gives teachers the ability to help those who are struggling, it also gives students amazing self-confidence when they are given the extra time and attention that they need to be successful.  

Re-teaching - Elementary teachers know that it takes students different amounts of time to master new concepts and skills, so they often back up and re-teach their students. In my opinion, re-teaching should happen far more at the middle school level. Oftentimes middle school teachers are plowing through their content, keeping all of their classes together, but we leave kids behind that way.  I have found that exit slips or quick check-ins (informal assessment/quizzes) let me know when I need to stop and back up so that the majority of the students have the foundation that they need to move forward.  What about those outliers who aren't "getting it?" Think about pulling them into a small group as mentioned above.  

Parent Communication - My elementary teacher friends communicate with parents in a variety of ways such as sending newsletters through email, keeping a class blog, or updating their class website religiously. Parents seem to always know what is happening in the elementary classroom.  When kids go off to middle school, the attitude is often that students need to be responsible for communicating with parents about what is happening in school. Why is that? Don't parents of middle schoolers still deserve to know what is happening in their child's classrooms? There are lots of ways to communicate with parents is this day and age, thanks to social networking and other web-based tools.  (Read my post about my favorite way to communicate with parents through the app Remind101.)  If we want parents to be our partners, I think the communication needs to be maintained even when students reach middle school. 

There you have it. Three ways to bring a little elementary into the middle school classroom.  Kids are kids, no matter what their grade level in school. If you are a middle school teacher and you have never taught at the elementary level, ask if your administrators would allow you to visit a neighboring elementary school for a few hours some day. You'll be amazed at what they do and how good it is for kids! 

If you have experience as an elementary school teacher, please share some elementary practices that you feel would be beneficial in a middle school classroom.

Great Teachers Wear Orange

Teaching is hard. It's incredibly rewarding and fulfilling and exciting, but it is downright hard. Sometimes it is also hard to stay positive. As teachers, we want so badly to be the best that we can be, but teaching today is remarkably challenging. On top of our work in the classroom, there's planning, assessing, grading, and meetings. It's just. so. hard.

BUT...

I want to stay positive, and I believe it is my choice. Although teaching will never be easy, I can choose to hold my head up high and be proud of what I do each day because I love what I do. I love being a teacher. So today, along with many of my amazing colleagues, we decided to show our commitment to our work, to our students, and to each other by wearing the color orange.

Why orange, you ask?


Orange stands for enthusiasm - something teachers must show to motivate, encourage and engage their students.

Orange stands for warmth - something teachers must spread to let students know that they have a heart, they are human and they care.

Orange stands for energy - something teachers must embody to share their positivity and passion with others.

Orange stands for success - something for which teachers continually strive to ensure that all students are learning and growing.


Orange stands for what all great teachers stand for.  If you agree, perhaps you will stand with us and wear orange too.

Jot Dots - A New Approach to Summarizing

As a 6th grade language arts teacher, one of the learning targets that I am responsible for teaching my students from the ELA literature strand of the Common Core states, "provide a summary of the text distinct from personal opinions or judgments." (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.6.2 ) To introduce summaries for narrative text, I began by having students read picture books which allowed students to practice essential reading skills in a non-threatening way.

Easy enough, I figured. I offered students a graphic organizer with a very popular summarization strategy known as the 5 W's + 1 H. Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? 

It was an epic fail, as the kids say.  

One of the reasons the students struggled with their picture book summaries was because their topic sentence had a very narrow focus.  They would begin the summary with the "who" of the story, but that did not help them introduce the main idea of the story at all.  Luckily, my wonderful literacy coach mentioned a strategy to me called "Jot Dots" taken from the Write Tools.  I must say that after teaching it to my students, I am hooked!

The strategy begins by asking students to "Name it, Verb it, Give the Big Idea." Essentially, this is a formula for building a strong topic sentence. They name the book, choose an active verb and then write the big idea or theme for the story. (See the presentation below for a specific example of what this looks like for students.) What a simple, yet effective way to begin a summary! It was a hit with all of my classes when they realized how easily they could generate a well-written, focused topic sentence for their summaries.  

Next, I had the class write five "Jot Dots" which were notes of five words or less about the sequence of events in the story. Students practiced writing their Jot Dots so that they could organize the rest of the summary that would follow their topic sentence. Again, success!  Everyone had a plan of what they were going to write about, which built the students' confidence.  

Finally, students stretched the Jot Dots out into individual sentences so that they could elaborate upon each idea. Before long, the students had beautifully written summaries without breaking a sweat. The difference between using the 5 W's + 1 H and the Jot Dots was night and day!  
Below is the presentation that I used with my class.  If you teach summarizing, I urge you to try out this approach with your students.  I was blown away and I am sure you will be too!

Summarizing from Marcie Faust

Remind101: A New Approach to Parent Communication

When I started teaching over 10 years ago, just about every teacher I knew wrote a classroom newsletter that came home in the form of a piece of paper.  I am fairly certain that a good percentage of those newsletters ended up in a crumpled wad of recyclable material at the bottom of most kids’ backpacks.  To ensure that I was reaching my entire audience, I decided to use a smarter and far more revolutionary way of communicating with all of my students’ parents: email.  I mean, what parent doesn’t have an extra 5-10 minutes in their day to read an email lovingly crafted by that brand new, 20-something teacher who wants to tell you every single detail about what is happening during your child’s school day?

Well, I am a parent now myself, and I’ve got news for you…I do not have time to read all of the newsletters that I receive via email.  Because not only do I get newsletters from my kids’ schools - I get them from the religious school, sports teams and enrichment classes too.  Sound familiar?  Of course,  I don’t want to sound ungrateful for the communication.  I am SO grateful.  I just do not have the extra time in my day to read them all!  

Enter Remind101.  Where have you been all of my teaching career!?  This is a brilliant, web-based service with an extremely functional smart-phone app that allows me to text my students' parents, without ever exchanging a phone number.  Now  I can keep the lines of communication open with  bite-sized updates about what is happening in my classroom.  Quick to send - quick to read. Now I can be sure that my message is being read because it's only 140 characters, and even the busiest of people can find the time to read that!

If you are still sending email newsletters, I highly recommend making the switch. Busy parents like me will thank you!  

#ReadyToLearn

Last spring, middle school teachers from our district were introduced to the amazing Jack Berckemeyer, a high energy, hilarious educational consultant who taught our teachers a tremendous amount about student engagement and how to build effective middle school teams.

This year, our school adopted the phrase "Ready To Learn," which we are borrowing from Jack.  The first day of school, our middle school teams shared what it means to be ready to learn with our students, and we are working hard at reinforcing the importance of this phrase each and every day so that it becomes a part of the culture at our school.

Prior to this year's Open House, the 6th grade students and teachers on my team put together a bulletin board inspired by Twitter and our new motto of "Ready To Learn." We gave students cards with pseudo-Twitter handles (@StudentName) and asked them to create tweets (messages of 140 characters or less) to show what it means for students to be #ReadyToLearn.  The responses were awesome and our students loved the idea of getting to tweet, even if it was just on paper.

The feedback I received from students was so overwhelmingly positive as they began generating their tweets that I immediately knew we had to continue using paper tweets with students in the future. Right now I am toying with the idea of students writing Exit Tweets to reflect on what they learned in class as well as writing Celebration Tweets for when something great is happening in class. I am curious to hear of other suggestions, so if you have any ideas of ways we can use "paper tweets" with our students, please leave a comment below.

Implementing the Common Core: Getting Started

This year, with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and a new middle school schedule that reduced language arts classes from 80 minutes down to 60 minutes, I have a lot to cover in a (relatively) short amount of time.  Here are my top three goals for how I plan to implement the Common Core into my teaching this year.

1. Start with the Standards
This year, I must remind myself that my responsibility is not to teach any particular unit, theme, or story.  My responsibility is to teach the standards using the materials that I have available to me.

2. Experiment with Standards-based Assessment
This week, my literacy coach helped me design a pre-assessment to assesses the standards that I plan to teach during the first quarter of the school year.  We wrote questions that align to the common core so that I have some baseline data that I can use to inform my instruction.  I expect that the data will give me rich information about my students so that I can tailor lessons around their specific needs. After I have explicitly taught these standards, I can use the same assessment as a post-assessment to measure growth among my students.

3. Keep Moving Forward
Our kids deserve a standards-based education, and I plan to focus on the future to ensure a quality, meaningful, and effective education for all of my students.  Even though the road will be long, I plan to keep moving forward by staying committed to the changes being made in how we educate today's children.

I am really looking forward to the year ahead. If you are beginning to implement the Common Core into your teaching, what are some of your personal goals?

The View from a Google Classroom

The other day, I overheard a student refer to my classroom as a Google Classroom, which is a fairly accurate name for it these days.  I can hardly remember what life was like before Google became part of my life as a teacher. To honor my district's recent adoption of Google Apps for Education, here are my top three favorite ways that Google Apps has improved my teaching and enhanced student learning in my classroom.

1.  Google Sites - My students' learning hub
Instead of a one-dimensional website, a Google Site can be completely interactive once you embed Google docs such as forms, slides or sheets.  The interactivity has given my students a place to contribute and learn from one another.  Learning objectives, rubrics, and assignments are all posted on the site so that students have one place to go for anything related to my class.  Oh and it looks pretty too, so that's an added bonus.

2.  Google Drive - Live document sharing
It is hard to imagine what life was like before Google Drive.  Students can collaborate on the same working document and automatic saving means that their work is never lost. I am especially grateful for the incredible script written by Andrew Stillman named Doctopus, which interacts with a Chrome extension called Goobric.  I can now assess students' writing in record time and use it as formative data to help students improve their writing.  It. is. amazing.

3. Blogger - A stage for teacher and student voices
Not only do I blog as a way to share my thoughts with others, but I am encouraging my students to do the same.  Journaling in a notebook has become rather archaic.  Why not blog about your views and opinions where an authentic audience awaits?  My students love to blog whenever they are given the opportunity. Wait, boys begging me to write!? With Blogger, they actually do!

Obviously, Google Apps are only possible with access to technology, which can be tricky at times when I have to share devices with other teachers.  (Here's the part where I beg my district to bring a one-to-one computing initiative to our school.)  Even so, Google has transformed my classroom and I am never looking back.

Have you noticed any changes in teaching and learning since Google came to town?  Please share them.

Persuasion OUT Argumentation IN

Historically, teachers in upper elementary and middle schools have focused on teaching students three types of writing: expository, narrative, and persuasive.  With the adoption of Common Core State Standards, teachers will be making some major changes in how we teach writing to students.  One of those changes for me was to forget about teaching persuasion and to start teaching argumentation.

This week, my students delved into their first piece of argumentative writing.  Augmentative writing requires logic and reasoning as opposed to persuasive writing which relies on an emotional appeal.  In order to get my students to understand this distinction, I gave them a writing assignment on an authentic and relevant topic.  Students wrote about the impact of learning a second language.  (The foreign language teachers at my school can thank me later.)  Students were not writing to persuade the reader to think a certain way about learning a second language.  Instead, they were writing to inform the reader about the impact that learning a second language has on students.  

What I witnessed was amazing!  Students were elbow-deep in articles about modern foreign language education, digging for evidence to support their claims.  Students began the assignment by analyzing a variety of texts so that they could evaluate whether or not the information would be useful in their writing.   Some students even tossed out articles littered by opinions and unsupported facts because they were taught to include concrete evidence to support their claims.  Students were actually excited about their research!

Writing research-based arguments is exactly what these students will be expected to do in college, and I have really enjoyed introducing this important skill to my students. This is just one example of the many shifts that will take place as a result of the Common Core.  What are your thoughts about how the Common Core State Standards will affect teaching and learning in our schools?

The Lost Art of Letter-Writing

Last week, my students spent some time learning about letter-writing.  While many of my students have experience writing friendly letters home from summer camp or writing emails to their friends, it should come as no surprise to us that their experience in letter writing is quite limited.  That's what you would expect of our digital natives, right?

What began as a simple review of "how to write a letter" turned into lessons that may stick with some of my students for years to come.  (I can only hope!)  As they began to write their letters, many of my students learned the following:

• How to write a letter of appreciation to a friend, family member or teacher
• How to write a letter of complaint when you are disappointed by a product or service 
• How to write a letter of sympathy to someone struggling with an illness or loss
• How to write a letter of thanks to an individual who has helped you, your community or your country 
• How to write a letter to your teacher to give feedback in a respectful, tactful manner 
• How to address an envelope  (Apparently, there are many 6th graders who have never addressed their own envelopes  until now.)

I was astonished by all of the lessons that grew from a little lesson on letter-writing. It reminded me that letter-writing truly is a lost art, and even though we have electronic means to communicate, we always need to know how to write a letter for a variety of purposes.

What do you think about the value of letter-writing with today's generation of learners?

Skype Me Maybe

As the winter months press on, students are constantly getting sick and missing school.  Even when students are only out of school for one day, catching up on schoolwork can be a nightmare.  Not only will the students need to make up what they missed in all of their classes while they were out, but they will have to complete all of their daily homework assignments as well.  Just typing that last sentence gave me heart palpitations, so I can only imagine how stressed out my poor students feel when they are faced with this situation.

It dawned on me last week that I could easily Skype with any of my students who were home from school.  When I had my daughter six years ago, I regularly Skyped into my graduate class for several weeks until I felt ready to return to class.  Skype truly saved me from falling behind. Today, the technology is even better, and with the ability to share my screen during a Skype call, students could literally watch the same lesson that I am teaching at the Promethean Board and hear my voice, all in real time.  They could ask questions and get them answered right then and there, which means they would not have to play catch up when they get back to school.

Obviously, this is optional, but according to many of my students, they think it's a great option.  If any of my students want to Skype in for class, I am happy to arrange the call.  They just need to email me their Skype name before school starts so that I can be prepared for the call during their class period.  I am really looking forward to giving this a shot with my sickie students.  What do you think?  Should students be able to Skype into class when they are home from school?

Please Subscribe

I am very passionate about integrating technology into my teaching, which directly impacts the way in which I communicate with my students' parents.  It has come to my attention, however, that not everyone is ready to make the leap to Twitter, so I have established this blog as a communication tool to keep parents in the loop about the happenings of our language arts classroom.  Feel free to subscribe to this blog to get up-to-date information right into your email inbox.

Blogging with Students

This week, all of my students were given the opportunity to start their own blog using Blogger, a free blog-publishing service, which is part of Google Apps for Education (GAFE).  I wanted to give my students a venue for writing that extends beyond the typical spiral notebook, with the hopes that these blogs serve as portfolios of the students' writing for the remainder of the school year.

A blog allows students to put their writing out into the world and get feedback from others.  You can't get that type of an audience when you write in a notebook, which is what one of my Twitter followers suggested to me this morning when she tweeted, "Give students a voice...you open their world."

Right now the students' attitudes run the gamut from excited and motived to annoyed and confused.  I had a group of boys in my classroom just after 7:30am this morning, crowding around a computer to take a look at their classmate' new blog.  The enthusiasm was glorious.  Then later this afternoon, I overheard a few different students groaning about how "stupid" it is to have a blog.

We'll see if I can get those attitudes to change by June.  In the meantime, I have realized a couple of things.  First, you cannot please all of your students all of the time. And second, students who complain that something is stupid are usually afraid that it will be too hard or that they won't do well at the assigned task.

I am hopeful that blogging about literature and other topics will help motivate my students.  Having an audience beyond just me, the teacher, is definitely a way to keep students engaged and serious about their writing.  To any parents reading, I would recommend asking your child to share their blog's URL (web address) with you so that you can take a look at it from time to time.  It might be nice for them to know that you are interested and supportive of the work they are doing in 6th grade.

I'm Back...7 years later

I technically began this blog back in 2006 before blogging in education had become very popular.  At the time, I was a fourth grade teacher, and I was trying to figure out how to do this 21st century teaching thing.  A lot has happened since 2006.  To start, I no longer teach at the elementary school.  In between my years as a fourth grade teacher until now I have taught fifth grade and then served as a building technology coordinator from 2008-2012.  This year, I wanted a change so I took a position as a sixth grade language arts teacher at the middle school level.

My decision to return to the classroom stemmed from a desire to be more involved with students and less involved with fixing everyone else's technology.  I wanted to get back in the trenches, so to speak.  I was tired of talking the talk without walking the walk.  I loved the idea of being a technology coordinator, but I started to feel like I was getting out of touch.  (You can read about my life as a technology coordinator on another old blog here.)

So, now I am back in my very own classroom where technology integration is a way of life for me.  Thankfully my district has FINALLY adopted Google Apps for Education so that I can do my thing without jumping through a million hoops.  (Thanks DPS!)

I'm going to do my best to post often in an effort to document my great return to the classroom.  Thanks for reading!  Come back soon!