We’re willing to bet that you have done this before – taught a type of writing to your students and then moved on to the next lesson without ever coming back to review it. Most middle school ELA teachers understand the importance of reviewing past concepts (we call this “spiraling learning”), but it can be easy to skip over it. In this episode, Caitlin and Jessica will show you the best way to spiral your writing lessons, so you can ensure your students really understand the concepts.
Caitlin and Jessica will walk you through two simple but critical steps to use in your lesson planning, so you can intentionally incorporate spiraled lessons into your school year and really make sure your students master the learning they need!
Best of all, Jessica will share several examples of lessons that you can use to spiral students’ writing learning. Using the topic of narrative writing, she will give you ideas for reviewing description, dialogue, leads, ending, and plot. Spiraled lessons can be as fun as they are helpful!
Tune in now to hear:
- [01:40] Spiraling lessons is so important, but it’s easy to neglect doing it
- [02:00] Surprise! Fitting in each type of writing is not the most important part of our lesson planning for the school year! What is? Building in those spiraled lessons!
- [04:00] Jessica reminds listeners that most students don’t master concepts the first time they learn them.
- [05:40] One way to get great resources and support for teaching ELA, including spiraling learning? Join the EB Teachers’ Club!
- [0:20] Step #1 for planning spiraled writing lessons: Schedule your “deep dive” writing unit. At EB Academics, we recommend starting the year with narrative writing.
- [08:00] Step #2: Don’t stop there! Plug in review (in this example, narrative review) for multiple times throughout the year after this “deep dive.” These should be short and sweet – Caitlin gives a few examples..
- [10:00] The importance of adding spiraled lessons to your yearly plans. Don’t just say you’ll do it later!
- [11:10] Jessica gives a great example of a spiraled narrative writing lesson for descriptive writing: Guess Who!
- [16:40] Another example of narrative writing spiral review with Guess Who, this time with dialogue
- [21:00] More examples of narrative writing spiral review: teaching leads and endings with fairy tales
- [20:20] A really fun narrative writing spiral review, perfect for the end of the year: MASH!
Click here to watch on Youtube!
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