Letters to Express Opinion: A Lesson for Me

Over the summer, I was given the opportunity to rewrite my curriculum maps for my classes. Earlier this year I shared with you my success unit of Writing Personal Narratives with my 8th graders. Unfortunately, my first unit with 7th grade didn't go as well.

Feeling inspired through my readings of Kelly Gallagher's Write Like This, I wanted my 7th graders to have a first writing assignment that was meaningful for them. I thought to myself, "Junior High students always have an opinion! They should know letter format, so we can review. Writing a letter allows them to share their opinions with others." Not such a bad plan, perhaps.

I started the unit introducing the Six Traits of Writing. To help us narrow our topic, I use a mini lesson from The Traits of Writing: the Complete Middle School Guide that demonstrates a specific topic.

After demonstration and practice together, I asked my students to narrow their own topics. I was quickly disheartened. My students had dismal opinions about school and the teachers there. I went home exhausted and near tears because of the negativity. 

I didn't know what to do. I want my students to feel as if their opinions matter, but I could not handle the negativity, especially about colleagues and topics that I truly value as important. 

After talking with other junior high teachers and fellow English teachers, I created an instruction sheet that narrows the letters down to two topics. I also included a rubric and discussed with students how their work is to be graded.

I shared with my students why I was changing the assignment and we discussed the importance of being positive.

You can find this handout here.

My students and I had to brainstorm, again. Practice, practice! 

I then used an online resource as a reference for letter format. As a class, we discussed how this is a form of organization. We discussed what other formats we can put information in and decided what reasons a letter format best fit the information we are trying to communicate.

Using demonstration, I created this  example letter for my students to read.

For revising, I ask my students to complete a basic peer review. I provide these written instructions , and I also role play with another student prior to assigning partners.

We practice paragraph editing each Thursday, so they are familiar with the editing process.

Students who completed their letters on time also submitted them to the appropriate addressee. Those who wrote to our superintendent received responses back in letters! They were excited by this and pleased that their opinion did matter.

Articles to Ponder

This past week, my district so kindly sent our English department (all four of us!) to the NCTE Convention in Minneapolis. It was amazing! I can't wait to share with all of you my experience and what I learned while there. My students were very excited to see the pile of books that I brought back with me!

This got me thinking about professional development and how it looks during the busy school year. I try to read texts about pedagogy, teaching styles, and adapt unit plans. The reality though, is that I only have time to read bits and pieces. I often find myself reading articles online that are shorter and I am quickly able to relate to. Below are some articles that I've read this fall and a short reflection as to why I think they are important to share with other educators.

Minnesota Students' Scores Mixed on Nation's Report Card
I will admit, my principal forwarded this article to me, but I strongly believe that we should be aware of how our students are performing and what's being reported about them. I may not be a fan of testing, but I'm also a realist and understand why administrators and legislation look to statistics to measure student progress. As an English teacher, I can see how each of my student increases their communication through writing, reading, and speaking each year, but I am grateful that I don't have to write individual reports about each of these students. That would be an unrealistic feat to complete each spring.

There are some positive highlights in this article, including 8th grade scores: third-best in math and seventh-best in reading. Our 4th grade scores took some dips, but math is still second-best and reading is higher than the national average.

Declining Student Resiliency
This article from Psychology Today intrigued me because we had a training about resiliency this fall. This article explains how professors and other college faculty have noticed a drop in college student resiliency. Students are professionally visiting with mental health services and are visibly, emotionally upset in their classes.

I find this interesting because my career goals include preparing students for life outside of high school. The article suggests that "helicopter" parents are to blame for this. This may be true, but it is also societal. I also can't help wondering what role middle and high school teachers play in this. Are we meeting the expectations of society and holding the hands of our students too much?

Writing Workshop is Hard
I can't agree more with this article title. The days we have writing workshop in my classroom are the most exhausting. They don't seem to take too much prep as I try to limit to one or two mini lessons, but moving from student to student for individual conferences is a workout for my brain. I try not to limit my students' topics, so my mind is doing gymnastics as I go from essay to essay.

I think this article gives some good tips for sharing this process with parents, which I think is fantastic! It's also relatable to anyone who teaches using a workshop menu.


What have you been reading?

Personal Narrative Unit

This blog post has been a work in progress for a couple of weeks, but I'm glad to finally be ready to share it.

After introducing my procedures and organizing our interactive notebooks the first week of school, I wanted to start my 8th graders with a unit that engaged them in active reading and the writing process. We needed to warm up our skills from 7th grade before working with longer texts and research writing, so I began with our Personal Narrative Unit.

Within our writing lessons, we do review our material using games and discussion. This unit has two summative assessments: a unit quiz and their personal narratives.

Available for download and revising!

Lesson One: When I began this unit, my first step was to review and front-load vocabulary. You can find my list of words here. In our interactive notebooks, we add this to our Vocabulary Section. I give the students a foldable to cut out and place on the page.

I explain to my students that by placing the term on the front, and writing the definition on the lines of their notebook, we have created flashcards to use  when studying. Some of my 8th graders loved this!

Having them cut and paste on our block lessons also provides them with a brain break. I allow them to grab their own materials and put the scraps into recycling. They get up and moving while still being on task.

I don't go through all seven terms on a single day. We began with the first four (nonfiction, autobiography, memoir, personal narrative) and they thought of the examples that they have either read or wrote themselves. We also compare and contrast how autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative are similar and different.

We then go through a short brainstorming process. We save these in our interactive notebooks in the Writing Section. For three minutes, the students make a list of memories in their lives that they could write about. We share some of our ideas. If we find that our ideas are too broad, we take more time to make them more specific for a writing assignment. 

For example, students often say something like "My trip to Texas." Great! But can you write with specific details about the WHOLE trip to Texas in three pages? No probably not. Let's create a second list based on your broad topic. What did you do in Texas?

Lesson Two: We add our new term "setting" to our foldable. I then introduce our first text, which comes from our class textbook, McDougal Littell's The Language of Literature, Grade 8. Teachers could self select other texts, too.

We then read our first core-text, an excerpt for Doris Kearns Goodwin's Wait Till Next Year. As a class, we read aloud, but each student was held accountable with a small post-it to find a sentence that describes the setting. The only definition they have is that it either describes the time or place.

After reading the story, we share our post-its. Through discussion, we identify what types of details create the setting: sensory details! 

This leads us into our second step for the writing assignment. We return to our brainstorm lists and I ask students to go through their lists to see which topics they have strong sensory details for. Then, we make a decision. The brainstorming continues. We created a list of the five senses (sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch), and they listed what details they remembered about each of these. I don't require them to write in complete sentences, but to have enough information to remind them.

Lesson Three: We add the next term "anecdote" to our foldable. As eighth graders, my students understand that characters are an important part of their stories, but how do they present information about them?

We read our second core-text, an excerpt from Reeve Lindbergh's Flying and we try to identify the anecdotes as we read together. For the first anecdote, I demonstrate teacher think-aloud for inferences about characters. The second one we find, I ask them open-ended questions to draw their own inferences, and then the remainder they analyze themselves.

We are then able to brainstorm our characters and the anecdotes they can describe about their characters. We start by creating (another) list of who was with them. I tell them to consider the people directly with them and also bystanders they may have said "hello" to or exchanged a fun fact about a display they looked at. 

The students then choose three characters to develop anecdotes. At this time, I give them a sentence starter. We completed an example about me.

Ms. Hansen is so organized that she spent a week helping us organize interactive notebooks with organized sections, page numbers, and even a table of contents.

The next class wrote this one: 

Ms. Hansen is so crazy that one morning she was skipping down the hallway before the bell rang. In class she taught a lesson about the suffix "-al" and found it exciting. We all had to ask: "Did you drink coffee again?"

My students then wrote short anecdotes for their own characters.

The anecdotes that I expected my students to write were shorter and less complex than Lindbergh's, but our writing assignment is also shorter.

Lesson Four: We add our final term "theme" to our foldable. My eighth graders have studies theme seventh grade, so this is a reminder to them.

As a class, we went back and re-read the endings of our two core texts and identified the themes. We also noted how the theme seemed to reveal itself near the end of the text.

Students then read our last text Jewell Rhode's independently. Some students may be paired together based on learning needs. They then complete an Exit Slip. I post these directions on my board.

EXIT SLIP: Write a paragraph describing the theme of Jewell Parker Rhode's "Block Party." Follow paragraph format and include specific details from the text.





As part of our brainstorming, I then ask students to brainstorm what important themes their experiences have. They have to remember that they may have learned something, but that it also applies to their audience.

Lesson Five: Using all of their brainstorming, my students are then given writing days to complete a rough draft. We continue to keep these in our Writing Section. After all the brainstorming we did, my students were excited to have a writing day to put it all together.

I have to say, I was astounded by the writing that I got from my students. Not only was their length longer than required, but the amount of detail they included brought their writing to life. I also write a rough draft while my students do. I am available to answer questions and many of them like to share bits and pieces as they go, but I still add to my notebook with them.

Lesson Six: Now that students have their rough drafts, I present them with their formal directions and a rubric. Most of my rubrics follow the same format, so my students know what to expect. You can find my rubric (available for adaptation) here.

I then give them the first step in revising: where to add dialogue. This is just as important to the events and character development. Most of my students worried, "Ms. Hansen, we don't remember what we said." I give them the same advice my college writing teacher did: "You know the things you say, and you usually know what the people closest to you say. It's not fiction, but exaggeration." 

I also demonstrate using my example of my rough draft. Then they have work to do on their own. After they go through their handwritten drafts writing notes where to add dialogue, I allow them to use computers to write their second drafts.

Lesson Seven: We talk about paragraph structure in fiction. We build off that they know about formal paragraph in our essays, but then I usually get a strange look when I tell them that they get to "break those rules!" No more topic sentences, no minimum number of sentences, no transition. Just the series of events.


This year I borrowed an anchor chart from online. Unfortunately, I cannot give credit to the original creator, but thank you! 

Rather than having my students include this in our notes, we discuss and create a saying to remember when to change paragraphs. Then, we practice by going through my draft.

They then organize their writing into multiple paragraphs.

Lesson Eight: Peer review! I usually use a stack of index cards to group my students with a partner for this step. Thankfully, they are familiar with the peer review process with me. 

I give them this handout to guide them with reading and reviewing with their partner. Afterwards, they get work time to revise. They then meet with their partner again to go through editing. Because I do weekly paragraph editing, I don't need to give specific directions on the editing process.

When my students feel that they have completed the writing process, they "share" via Google Docs, and turn in the rubric. I'm very strict about needing them to submit a rubric with their name on it. I explain that this is how I know that they writing assignment is complete, and that I don't want to give them a grade on a rough draft simply because it was shared.


I hope you find my unit and lesson overview helpful. May you create enjoyable, engaging, and effective lessons! Share your success stories with writing assignments and workshop.