Ensure your students are MEETING the language standards

Are your students fully meeting the language standards? Use this process to break down the standards into smaller objectives and ensure standard mastery.

Are your ELA students MEETING the language standards?

I knew I covered language in every assignment. I mean the main job of an ELA teacher is to teach how to read and write LANGUAGE…right? 

So, my students got LOTS of practice…

But were my students FULLY meeting the language standards? It’s hard to say.

There are five main language standards for seventh grade:

• Use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading, or listening. 
• Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing. 
• Use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading, or listening. 
• Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grade 7 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies. 
• Demonstrate understanding of figurative language, word relationships, and nuances in word meanings. 

These language standards are super important, yet rather vague. Even as they get broken down into smaller objectives, it can be difficult to determine the key concepts to be taught at each grade level.

• Yes, my students use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading, and listening…but are they using the knowledge for their grade level? 

• Yes, my students are decent at vocabulary but are they at or above grade level?

• Yes, we work on figurative language and nuances but do students understand them enough to be considered average or higher for typical seventh graders?

Yikes!

I loved teaching ELA but it is standards like these that are hard to use as data points. So much of the ELA curriculum is subjective. It is not like math where they either know how to add or they don’t.

So, how do you know if you are MEETING the language standards for your age range?

Well, first of all, make sure you have a STANDARDS CHECKLIST for your grade level.

I love this checklist because not only does it provide a breakdown of the 7th grade standards, but it provides a 7th/8th grade comparison chart so that you can compare the differences between each grade which is super helpful!

Check out all of The Sparkly Notebook’s checklists HERE!

Once you have a checklist, break down each standard into objectives. I go over how to do this in this BLOG POST if you are looking for some guidance!

Then, you can either plan your units so that your lessons specifically align with each of these objectives OR you can incorporate mini language lessons here and there. 

For example, the seventh-grade language objective for L.2b states “Spell correctly.”

Wow!

Helpful!

Ha! 

So, obviously, we work on spelling in each unit, but we could specifically work on spelling rules in a small mini-unit or teach the rules throughout multiple units. 

The Sparkly Notebook’s new product line provides a product for each ELA Common Core standard. So we do a lot of the breakdown work for you and even provide exercises to teach each of the objectives. 

For example, we breakdown the 7L2 standard into the following three objectives:

1. I can compose a sentence with descriptive adjectives before the noun they describe and use proper punctuation when using coordinating adjectives.
2. I can spell words commonly found in seventh-grade level text including homophones, homonyms, and homographs.
3. I can use proper punctuation when writing including commas, semicolons, quotation marks, colons, and apostrophes.

Using this breakdown, we can teach a mini-unit on each objective or make each objective a criterion in a larger unit.

In the 7L2 product itself, we include the following resources/activities for the SPELLING objective (objective #2):

• General rules for spelling
• Vowel patterns
• Suffix and Prefix Patterns
• Doubling Letter Patterns
• Word Ladder Activity
• Word Train Activity
• Basic Rule for Social Media/Texting Audiences
• Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms Rules
• Homophones, Homographs, and Homonyms Practice

So, we make sure we have a resource or activity that covers all concepts within the objective to ensure that students are MEETING the standard!

Check out the FULL 7L2 PRODUCT HERE or check out any of the Language standard products HERE!

Overall, meeting the language standards…

can be a bit overwhelming, but we are here to help!

If would like some extra guidance on standard breakdown, we would love to have you join our Facebook group which specifically focuses on ELA Standard Breakdown!

See you there!