The Sparkly Notebook

Mastering the ELA Standards in Middle School

Standard Mastery

MASTERING the standards with your students

Need help ensuring your students are mastering the standards? Check out this new product line from The Sparkly Notebook!

In case you don’t know, I am extremely standards focused!

Ha! That surely isn’t a surprise by now.

I love the standards and feel they are amazing guides to ensure we provide the quality education our students need and deserve. 

With that being said, it can be quite difficult to design our curriculum in a way that covers ALL of the standards. For a complete list of the standards for your state, click HERE!

For example, RI2 for seventh-grade states, “Determine two or more central ideas in a text and analyze their development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary of the text.” Sounds relatively easy in theory, but when we break it down, there can be some gray area.

What exactly does it mean to analyze the development of the central idea?

And although an objective summary sounds easy enough, it is requiring students to do a couple of things first. Students must filter out the subjective information from the text and then shorten the information into a concise format…both of which can be quite difficult for our youth.

So, how do we as teachers ensure that our students are mastering the standards?

To ensure your students are mastering the standards, we need to do the following three things:

  • First, we need to deconstruct the standards to ensure we know exactly what we are teaching! Use one of The Sparkly Notebook’s standard checklists to help you out!
  • Second, we need to map out our curriculum guide to make sure our assessment plan for the academic year will cover each standard. This should be a process you complete with the other core teachers in your particular subject area.
  • Third, we need to design lessons that fully cover the standards, providing an opportunity for students to MASTER each standard. This is the fun part, and yet, it can be daunting at times.

But, guess what!?!

At The Sparkly Notebook, we came up with a new product line to help ya’ll out!

First of all…

Grab FREE Middle School ELA Standard Breakdowns Below!

* indicates required
Which grade level are you most interested in?

Second, we created one product for EVERY standard!

Say what?!?

Check them all out here, but I’ll explain how it works!

Let’s use the same standard from earlier in the blog.

Central Idea and Objective Summary standard-based learning

RI.7.2

“Determine two or more central ideas in a text and analyze their development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary of the text.”

First, we broke down the standard for you into three objectives:

  1. I can determine two or more central ideas in a text
  2. I can analyze the development of two or more central ideas over the course of a text.
  3. I can produce an objective summary of the text.

Then, we wrote a passage, created a question set, and created an activity for each objective in the standard. Basically, we did all the hard, time-consuming work and laid it out on a platter for you!

Check out the RI.7.2 standard product here!

Once you dive into the standard products, you can even add supplementary material to your lesson as well. My favorite one for the RI.7.2 standards is this TikTok Digital Passage set. My students are obsessed with TikTok and many have enjoyed this supplementary lesson!

If you have any questions…

about breaking down the standards or using standards in general to build your curriculum, I would love for you to reach out! Feel free to also visit this blog for more information!

The Sparkly Notebook signature
Join The Sparkly Notebook email list.
Join The Sparkly Notebook’s email list for other ELA tips and tricks! See you there!

Three questions for your end of year reflection

Reflect on these three questions for end-of-year reflection and refine your teaching methods to better support your students in standard mastery.

Have you ever gotten to the end of a school year and thought…

“Dang! I CRUSHED this year!”

I don’t think I have EVER felt that way. It kind of comes with the profession, don’t you think? 

We are constantly attending professional development meetings, learning how to make our teaching better. We have some of our worst class periods tattooed into our brains and unfortunately probably dwell on those days more than we should.

I know when I get to the end of the year, I typically think…

”Well, I did my best…but I could DEFINITELY do better next year.”

Is this you, also?

Are you hard on yourself year in and year out?

Well, you are not alone! 

As much as it is a curse, it is also what makes us teachers so great. We don’t settle for mediocrity. We don’t settle with doing the same thing each year (and with best practices in education always changing, how can we?)

So, at the end of the year, what questions should we reflect upon in order to make necessary changes for the next year?

Did I cover all the standards for my subject area?

As you know, education builds on itself from one year to the next. Students may learn about adjectives this year in order to learn about adjectival clauses next year. Thus, it is important to make sure that all grade-level standards are covered.

The easiest way to review your curriculum is to use a checklist. Document your required standards and go through each standard on the list, identifying the units you used to teach each standard. Take this process a step further and look at average grades for each unit. How many students mastered the standard? How many students were proficient? How many students fell below the proficiency mark?

You may even need to ask yourself…

Do I even know if they mastered the standards taught in that unit? Did my assessments truly assess the standards or were my lessons more fluffy than they needed to be?

☝️I know these questions can be tough because we may come to conclusions that are unsettling…but these unsettling conclusions are often the start of true reflection and TRUE change.

Check out The Sparkly Notebook’s checklists which walk you through the standards for different grade levels and subjects. If you teach more than one subject area or more than one grade level, grab the K-12 Standards Breakdown Checklist Bundle. 

Grab FREE Middle School ELA Standard Breakdowns Below!

* indicates required
Which grade level are you most interested in?

Were my students able to learn using their preferred learning style?

This is a tough one. The beginning of the school year starts and you are handed 23 to 123 students 🙂 who are all at different levels and all have different learning styles. We, teachers, try to incorporate diverse teaching methods throughout the year, but maybe we missed the mark with certain lessons. So, how do we improve? Is it even possible to improve in this area?

It may not be possible to master, but it is definitely possible to improve. 

Start by sharing a survey with your students. Ask them questions like:

  • Did you enjoy your English class this year? Why or why not?
  • How do you learn best and did you feel like the lessons were taught in a way that you could master the content?
  • In your opinion, what could be improved in the day-to-day in my classroom?

These types of questions may not work for younger students in the elementary classroom because they probably won’t truly know how to provide the answers you are looking for. However, parents may have some helpful insight and so you could always send the survey home to them. This option may be WAY scarier because you are opening a door for parental critique, but if we are truly going to make change, don’t we want to know what could be improved even if it hurts our egos a bit?

*You ALWAYS reserve the right to accept and decline any of the suggestions you receive. Some responses may not be helpful at all…BUT even one or two responses that trigger change will make this entire process completely worth it!

Some of my lessons didn’t go well, how can I come up with new ideas for next year?

This question requires some research. It is so easy to fall into a dull lesson due to a lack of time and energy during the school year. 

But right now, you are at closing in on the final weeks of the year. You probably have a couple of PD days here soon to finalize your grade books and tidy up the classroom and do whatever else it is you need to do before summer break. Maybe take some time during those days to research some new ideas for lessons while the year is still fresh in your mind. Spend a day this summer getting together with other teachers in your subject area to brainstorm standards-aligned units that are fun and engaging. Check out the blogs written by other teachers to learn how they teach the areas that you struggle with the most.

Essentially, the goal is to look at those standards that you know you didn’t cover well and figure out how to teach them better next year.

If you want something simple, The Sparkly Notebook has a new product line that does this very thing. These ELA standards-based products include one product for EACH standard so that you can truly dive into the standards that require more support. Our focus with each product is to use fun and engaging lessons to teach mastery of each standard and help you feel more confident as a teacher that you are covering each standard well.

Check out the product line here! 

For more information about this product line and why we created it, check out this previous blog post.

To put it simply…

There is no such thing as a perfect classroom. There is always room for tweaks and change…and by truly reflecting on essential questions like the three stated above, you will have the map that will help you make necessary changes to improve your teaching from year to year!

The Sparkly Notebook signature
Join The Sparkly Notebook email list.
Join our email list and get FIVE FREEBIES to utilize in your own classroom!

Teach to Full ELA Standard Mastery

Teaching ELA is hard. There, I said it. The standards are complex and incredibly broad, and they do not lend themselves to knowing exactly what is needed to teach ELA to FULL standard mastery. There is a lot of digging, researching, and analyzing to do in order to confidently teach ELA to full standard mastery.

My Poor First-Year Students

I often make the joke that I need to apologize to my first year (ok, first few years) students for the lack of understanding I had when I began teaching. Seriously, I was truly in the clouds and loved what I was doing but lacked intention in any of my planning. Data. What’s that have to do with anything? Tests. Those are given for a test grade. Standards. Those are for guidance and not meant to be exact. *Insert Facepalm* I’m sorry, students!

Teach to FULL ELA Standard Mastery

Fast-forward to future me who knows better. It really didn’t take me long to realize fluffy, cutesy lessons could not be the core of my classroom. Don’t get me wrong, that does not mean my lessons became boring and mundane. It simply means I am more intentional in planning. I used to see a cute idea and find ways to embed the standards, whereas, now I know to start with the standards. I have a few steps that I take when starting with the standards. It really is not a complex process, but it is so very important.

Knowing how to start with the standards seems like a “duh” concept, but I don’t think it is. I think college teaches you to start with the standards, but it doesn’t teach you what that truly looks like. What does starting with the standards entail? How do you learn to be more intentional in your teaching? I will show you what works for me! 😊

Achieving ELA Standard Mastery

When starting with the standards, there are a few important steps one must take:

  1. Deconstruct the Standard: Break down the standard to get the learning targets 
    1. Look at the nouns – What are the concepts being taught? 
    2. Identify the verbs – What do students need to be able to do with those concepts? 
    3. Can you break the concepts down into learning targets?
    4. What prerequisites do you need to cover each learning target?

      *** Learn more about deconstructing standards at my blog post that is fully dedicated to the deconstructing standards process
  2. Vertical Alignment: Compare your grade level standard to the grade below and above yours
    1. Which concepts are taught the previous year that you can review and not teach in-depth? What are students doing with those concepts in the previous grade?
    2. Which concepts will the teacher cover in the next grade level that you can teach at surface level? What are students doing with those concepts in the next grade?
    3. Which concepts are you teaching this year that are new to your grade level? These are the concepts you will need to teach in-depth.
  3. Match the Rigor: Determine the rigor of the standards and plan to meet that rigor
    1. What are the students having to do with each learning target? What level of thinking do they have to use to master that standard?
    2. Do your lessons allow students to practice at the right level of rigor?
    3. Are your assessments truly assessing students on the right level of rigor?
  4. Plan with Intention: Use your breakdown of the standard to write lessons and assessments
    1. Does your lesson plan teach each learning target for the standard?
    2. Do you have a plan for assessing student mastery for each learning target?
    3. Are you “covering” the standards or teaching to full ELA standard mastery?

Grab FREE Middle School ELA Standard Breakdowns Below!

* indicates required
Which grade level are you most interested in?

Intentional Lesson Planning

After you’ve broken down a standard, you will then want to make sure your lesson plans reflect all components of the standard. You want activities to teach and to assess each learning target. This is how you will truly teach to the full ELA standard mastery. If you would like to read more about the curriculum development process, I have a blog post that will take you through the next steps of planning your instruction.

As you are planning, if you want some ELA activities that already align directly to the ELA Common Core Standards, I have a product line that may be just what you need. With my passion for creating products that thoroughly align to the standards, match the rigor, and cover all the elements of a standard, these products have been created in a way that breaks down the standard into learning targets then has activities that aligns to each learning target. They also include a summative assessment that covers all the parts of the standard together. You can access the 7th grade standards-by-standard product line here.

If you are going through this “Breaking Down the ELA Standards” process and have any questions, please feel free to email me. I am always up for helping get this process going because I know there is much value in it. 

Happy ELA Standard Diving!

The Sparkly Notebook signature
Teach to Full ELA Standard Mastery

7th Grade ELA Products that align to the standards

↑ Top of Page