Writing About Reading: Resource Toolkit Part Two for Middle School

When the school year kicked off, I shared a unit I created for middle school classrooms. It was featuring one of my favorite books of the summer, Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds.

The unit I shared walked middle school teachers and students through ways in which to create a writing toolkit to use within other writing about reading units of study. So, I share with you today part two of what I shared a little over a month ago.

This unit links back to examples of the first unit and digital notebook examples as mentors. It also has a map of standards, slides of lessons for each text, and a digital notebook for students to utilize as they collect and write about the beautiful stories I share. The three texts are, For Every One by Jason Reynolds, Words with Wings by Nicki Grimes, and They Call Me Güero by David Bowles.

Objectives First

Click the image for full printable and viewable document.

Lessons to Build On

Below are images that link to a set of lessons for each text that encourages deep dives into verse and meaning, encouraging thoughtful responses and writing.

Students Respond

All the responses from students can be kept in a digital notebook or any type of tool that best fits the needs of your writers. I created this notebook as a tool to help pace and organize the intended responses.

I hope you can find an opportunity to share this work with students. These texts are lovely, inviting, and lend themselves not only to wonderful writing discussions but classroom discussions about real-life topics impacting adolescents right now. If you share this work with colleagues or students, I would love to hear how it goes. I eagerly await the day I can put these into practice with middle school readers and writers.

3 thoughts on “Writing About Reading: Resource Toolkit Part Two for Middle School”

This is amazing! Thank you for sharing. I work in a high school and can take some things and apply them up. So I appreciate when you dip into the older levels.

I know this doesn’t apply to writing, and the purpose of your blog, BUT if you have any ideas on how to get the 7-9 grade band of kids to SPEAK more virtually that would be great. And they do have writing/thinking time beforehand. We also tried baby steps of typing. But I would love to hear their voices. Google Meet finally got break out rooms so that is a help. But even chiming in full class!! TIA.

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