Let’s talk about how to teach W.9 in middle school ELA. We’ve put together some learning targets, resources, and activity ideas to make teaching this standard easier!
Using information from texts to support your writing, presentations, thoughts, or goals is an important part of adulthood, and in middle school ELA, we really start to explore the depths of this skill.
Using information from texts requires a good amount of comprehension, as well as the ability to see how information can be pieced together to make an argument.
This is tough for students.
They aren’t always great at picking out the best information from a text to support a conclusion, citing where the information came from, or figuring out how to get it to all fit together into a complete argument.
Today, we’re going to talk about W.9 and how we can teach W.9 in middle school ELA so that students will get a well-rounded experience with this standard.
As with all of the standards, we like to start by breaking down the standard into learning targets.
Learning Targets
When we break the standard into learning targets, we make the standard more manageable. It is more like a checklist that we can use to make sure that we are fully covering the skills.
In this post, we talk about how we break down each standard and make a plan for learning, practicing, and reviewing the standards throughout the year using the checklists below.
Here are the learning targets on which we developed our resources for W.9.
Teaching W.6.9 (6th Grade)
6th Grade Standard: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
6th Grade Learning Targets
- I can use evidence from a variety of grade- appropriate literary texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
- I can use evidence from a variety of grade-appropriate informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
Teaching W.7.9 (7th Grade)
7th Grade Standard: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
7th Grade Learning Targets
- I can use pieces from literary texts to support my writing.
- I can use pieces of informational texts to support my writing.
Teaching W.8.9 (8th Grade)
8th Grade Standard: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.
8th Grade Learning Targets
- I can apply grade 8 Reading standards to literature to support analysis, reflection, and research while writing.
- I can apply grade 8 Reading standards to literary nonfiction to support analysis, reflection, and research while writing.
Key Skill: Citing Sources (You have to know WHY!)
A big part of being able to use texts to support writing is knowing how to cite those texts.
A lot of teachers will let students use tools to cite their sources, and that is not a bad thing…unless we haven’t given students a good foundation for citing and why it is important.
When teaching students about citing sources, we have to teach them the WHY. Why do we cite? Why is it important?
After focusing on WHY and making that part very clear, we can move on to WHAT a citation looks like and HOW we actually cite a source.
If we are letting students use tools for the HOW, but we aren’t teaching them the WHY or the WHAT, then they are more likely not to notice the inaccuracies in the citations their tools are spitting out or realizing when information is missing.
We believe teaching students all three steps is important. In our 7th grade unit, we go over the WHY, HOW, and WHAT, and we provide video tutorials to help guide students through the process.
Once students have a full understanding of citing, then you can introduce them to the tools that will help them do it faster, but this time, they’ll have the necessary prior knowledge to make sure the tool is doing the citing correctly.
Resources for teaching W.9
When picking resources to help teach W.9, you’ll want to make sure the resource teaches, practices, and reviews the standard at the appropriate level for the students you’re teaching. For the W.9 standard, the skills are very different from the 7th grade to the 8th grade, so having resources that cover the skills at an appropriate level is important for this standard!
Each of our Sparkly Notebook resources was created based on the listed learning targets so you can know that the skills being covered are appropriate for the age and skill level of your students.
The resources include a lesson/activity for each specific learning target or concept and also include assessments, posters, and answer keys.
Activities and Projects for Practicing and Assessing W.9 in Middle School
If you need some activity ideas or lessons to use as you teach the W.9 standard, hopefully, this list will give you some ideas!
- Author’s Purpose Blog Posts: Practice identifying the author’s purpose by printing off or viewing copies of several blog posts on the same topic. Encourage students to debate what the author’s purpose is and why they may have that purpose.
- Gathering Evidence to Support Analysis: In our 6th-grade resource, we include lots of opportunities for students to answer questions about passages using textual evidence. This type of practice can be a key focus of a unit or used as bell-ringers throughout the year!
- Paraphrasing Practice: As part of our work on this standard, we do paraphrasing practice of different kinds of texts. This is a key component of our 7th-grade unit.
- Teaching an Analysis Process: As part of our 8th-grade unit, we focus a lot on setting up a process for analysis. This means breaking down texts into their parts, including the characters and plot structure of a fictional text or the author, perspective, and evidence presented by someone who is writing an informational text.
- Rendering NEW Stories: In our 8th-grade unit, we have a project where students learn about adaptations of stories. They learn the pieces of an adapted story and why writers might adapt an old story to make it new. As part of this project, students will adapt their own stories.
Ensuring your students are being exposed to all of the skills in each standard feels like a huge challenge, and we understand that. That is why we create standards-focused resources that provide teachers with activities, lessons, and assessments that explicitly teach each of the middle school ELA standards.
We hope this blog post and the others in this series will help you as you explore and make a plan for the middle school ELA standards.
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