All AboutLanguage Arts

What do we do with advanced students who need something more in language arts? Here are bunches of articles about how to differentiate vocabulary, word studies, spelling, and reading.

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Meeting Advanced Learners’ Needs in Language Arts

To start differentiating in Language Arts, it's often as simple as upgrading your examples. Bring in authentically interesting novels, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and words.

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Novel Studies

Other Language Arts Articles

Free Verse from A Particular Point of View

My go-to writing task is a free verse poem written from a particular perspective. I learned this idea from my boss, Sandi, who learned it from Joan Franklin Smutny (I think!). You can use ANYTHING as your prompt. A piece of art works well to introduce the idea, but you can move to writing once […]

How To Run A Novel Study

When you read a book with students, avoid getting bogged down with the nitty-gritty. Just pick one big idea and have fun reading! No quizzes, no memorizing, no essays. Just develop your students’ love of reading.

Writing in Pi-lish

Here’s the perfect constraint for March! Writing with the digits of Pi.

Analyzing Prefixes and Suffixes

Instead of just memorizing what a bunch of morphemes mean, we’re looking broadly, exploring patterns, finding unexpected similarities and weird differences.

Rewrite It, But Don’t Use “E”

Here’s an interesting way to move students past mundane patterns in their writing. Ask for a rewrite, but without a letter (or two).

Universal Themes and… Punctuation!?

Here’s how can we move a punctuation lesson beyond mere memorization and towards actually interesting thinking.

A Classic: “Who’s On First” and 21st Century Kids

My 21st century 12-year-olds absolutely died watching Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s On First” skit. And we got a great homophone activity out of it too.

Getting Ridiculous with Parts of Speech

Here’s how you can add some spice to an otherwise dull study of parts of speech.

How To Get A Kid To Read

No reader has ever said, “I love reading because my parents made me read challenging books” or “Once my teacher made me read at Lexile 980, I discovered how wonderful reading is!”

Rewriting a Sentence With Different Coordinating Conjunctions

The first unit in our writing program was always teaching the coordinating conjunctions. It always felt goofy teaching this to 6th graders – especially a gifted magnet class. I mean… do they really not know the difference between “and” and “but”?