My rule #5 for teaching middle school is to pick and choose the most interesting content you can find, whenever possible — topics that are relevant to the age group you’re teaching, AND even topics that spark a passion in you. The beautiful thing about English Language Arts is that the curriculum is mostly skills-based versus content-based. ELA teachers signed up to teach students literacy skills — reading, writing, language, listening, and, viewing — not a certain set of facts (as would be done in the content areas). It’s beautiful because we basically have the freedom to pick and choose content, as long as it teaches the skills, is standards-based, and is inclusive. So, my friends, make it a rule to choose content kids will respond to.

I love the freedom and variety in ELA. We can have students read, write, and view content from every single subject area — science, math, social studies, psychology, current events, EVERYTHING — from multiple perspectives. That gives us so many possibilities for high-interest topics that we can base our literacy lessons on.

In this blog post, I provide you with a list of HIGH-INTEREST TOPICS I generated by asking a group of kids, ages 11-18, “What topics are you interested in learning about?” Straight from the mouths of students, they told me all about what they wish teachers would teach them more about.

The Goal is this, which is my Rule #5 for Teaching Middle School: Make Learning HIGH-INTEREST

I say, “When it comes to loans, high-interest is terrible! But, when it comes to the content in your classroom, high-interest is fantastic!”

Here’s One Option: you could do like I have done and pick a nice, safe, feel-good topic that almost everyone can relate to (and wouldn’t mind reading and writing about): For me, that topic was dogs! (For you, it can be anything you like). Once I discovered kids are very open to discussing, reading, and writing about dogs, I went crazy and made TONS OF FREE activities about dogs (and then I expanded to other animals!). I am willing to admit I went overboard. THESE ARE JUST A FEW EXAMPLES THAT MAY INSPIRE YOU TO FIND A TOPIC YOU LIKE AND THEN GO CRAZY WITH TOO! (For example, video games are a great topic!)

Another option is that you can literally ask your students what they’re interested in. Like this:

• “Hey kids, I’m interested in learning what you guys actually WANT to learn about . That way, I can look for reading and writing topics that you might like. So, tell me some topics, and I’ll jot them down.”

• “If you HAD to pick up a book and read it right now, what would you want it to be about?”

• “What is one thing you do, that when you do it, time goes by so fast?”

I took my own advice, and I asked a group of kids aged 11 to 18 the three questions above. These are the topics they told me they want to learn more about:

• Disasters! Natural disasters! Man-made disasters! What they told me is ANY AND ALL DISASTERS!

• Conspiracies that have taken place

• Unsolved mysteries

• Climate change

• Any of the TedEd topics, especially TedEd short videos

• Greek Mythology

• Pompeii and the Mt. Vesuvius volcano

• Animals. (Check out these mostly-free animal-related lessons in my store!)

• Animal behavior

• Historical drama and interesting historical legends

• Psychology Topics: Such as the signs of lying, and why we dream

• Dreams and what the heck is up with them

• Nightmares

• Dinosaurs (and the latest discoveries)

• Stonehenge

• Fossils

• Planets

• Space mysteries, such as What’s in Saturn’s rings?

• Space travel: Past events but also the latest updates

• The Mars Rover (landed on Mars in February 2021)

• The problem with zoos, and animal rights issues

• Moral issues people face

• Oceans, including the unknowns

• Crime Scene Investigations and True Crime

• Hoaxes that people actually fell for

• Amazing Sports Stories

• Aliens and UFOs

• Video Games, such as Minecraft, Fortnite, etc.

• Japanese culture

• How movies get made, written, filmed

• What the 80s were like, what the 70s were like, etc.

• Guinness and other world records

• How to become a millionaire or billionaire

• Music: songs, bands, lyrics, instruments, etc.

• Life without homework, banning homework

• Fantastical creatures

Trust me. When you give them high-interest topics, they’ll be happier, which will make you happier. When you provide your students with high-interest learning resources they feel are relevant to them and interesting in some way, they will actually behave better. They will get sucked into whatever you are trying to get them read, write, or do and forget about misbehaving.

So, that’s why I created these high-interest informational texts and tasks. I went out of my way to make the articles super interesting to middle schoolers by writing about things that interest them. And, guess what? It worked. I keep hearing from teachers how kids get so into these passages. They actually want to answer the questions. They even want to discuss the articles as a group. 

My rule #4 for teaching middle school will make your adolescent students happier and more engaged, which will make you happier and more engaged. They’ll behave better and you’ll discipline less. Take my advice and give it a try!

I believe that affective learning is the most effective learning of all. To explain, I’ll share my incredibly simplified version of the learning theory that has driven my career in education. So here goes. When we take in information, we either 1) use it temporarily and then discard it (because it doesn’t have greater meaning to us), OR 2) store it into our minds by connecting it to other memories that have already been formed (which gain even greater meaning for us by connecting to each other).  Yes, just two choices when we take in information: 1) Take it, OR 2) Leave it.

In order for your brain to “take it” (store it), there needs to be a sense that to do so would be rewarding – either now or in the future. That sense of it feeling rewarding comes from the neurotransmitter dopamine. When you simultaneously learn something new while feeling this sense of reward, you are gonna remember it later!

And here’s a life hack: we can purposely make ourselves feel pleasure and connect to positive memories while taking in new information that we want to store to memory. How do we do this? By activating our five senses — the gateways to pleasure — while trying to learn something. We can use our eyes, our ears, our nose, our sense of touch, and our mouths (such as sampling Greek food while learning about Greek society wearing Greek clothing). We can also think positive thoughts. One of those positive thoughts is this information will be valuable and help me later.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to learn new information while someone is yelling at you? It’s so much easier to remember that same information when it’s delivered in a soothing, kind voice along with a compliment. Read on to get some ideas for making your classroom THE place to learn.

Oh, and for those of you who were wishing I had provided a simple definition of affective learning, I found a good one I like in a paper by Susan Gano-Phillips (Citing Miller): “Affective learning is concerned with how learners feel while they are learning, as well as with how learning experiences are internalized so they can guide the learner’s attitudes, opinions, and behavior in the future (Miller, 2005).”

The Goal is this, which is my Rule #4 for Teaching Middle School: Facilitate Affective Learning

Key Takeaway: Simultaneously Activate their Senses & Positive Emotions While Teaching Them

Here are some ways to incorporate affective learning:

• Make them laugh. Laughter feels good. Now if you can get them to laugh while you’re trying to teach them something new, voila!
• Center them first. Sometimes you need to settle everyone down and get them receptive to even hearing you, which you can do with quick meditational activities. Use a soothing voice, turn off a light or two, ask them to close their eyes, and then tell them it’s time to get ready to learn this new thing that is good to know about.
• Activate the sense of SIGHT:  look at or draw pictures, watch or make a video, use graphic organizers to visualize the information differently, do visualization activities with closed eyes, ask them to describe the appearance of their pets, make eye contact while speaking and listening to each other, keep a neat and tidy classroom versus a cluttered one, posters and such should invoke pleasurable feelings and be simple enough to quickly take in, etc.
• Activate the sense of SMELL:  Add to the good feeling tone by making your room smell good (in a scent somehow related to the content would be even better). Also, think about your upcoming teaching agenda. Ask yourself if there is any way you can associate the content with a smell you can present to students (perhaps in an essential oil)…such as a smell or seasonal odor that is mentioned in a story you’re reading.
• Activate the sense of TASTE:  this goes along the same lines as the one above…earlier I gave an idea about serving Greek food while teaching students about Greek civilization. The reason I said this is because I still remember doing this as the student when I was in 6th grade! See it works!
• Activate the sense of HEARING:  set the feeling tone for writing with classical music, have students analyze figurative language in songs, write songs, lip sync, make rhymes, play music that relates to the content (such as music played during WWII), etc.
• Activate the sense of TOUCH:  have students get up and move around, make a hands-on project, and make sure your room is at a comfortable temperature (it’s hard to learn when you feel too cold or too hot)…
• Do funny LOL Language instead of boring language. LOL Language is a set of no-prep printables I designed that combine serious learning (such as punctuating dialogue, using commas correctly, choosing the right vocabulary word, analyzing poetry, story starters, and much more) with humorous content! It’s all standards-based, important language practice, but the content consists of jokes and puns. Kids love it.
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• Plan activities that involve art, such as: drawing a comic strip of a scene, drawing a character’s thoughts inside a blank head, filling out a graphic organizer in the shape of the topic, drawing vocabulary words, make up a creature and describe it, etc.
• Plan activities that involve drama, such as: write a skit and act it out, act out a scene, play charades, etc.
• Play review games, such as: Jeopardy, Bingo, etc.
• Incorporate popular games into learning (with some prep on your part to adapt the content), such as: Balderdash, Scattergories, Heads Up!, etc.
• Get up and move around How about the Hokey Pokey?
• Plan comedic writing activities, such as: fractured fairy tales, a sitcom screenplay, a funny story, writing puns, etc.
• Here are some other fun and free activities

Here’s another trick I learned. When you provide your students with high-interest learning resources they feel are relevant to them and interesting in some way, they will actually behave better. They will get sucked into whatever you are trying to get them read, write, or do and forget about misbehaving.

So, that’s why I created these high-interest informational texts and tasks. I went out of my way to make the articles super interesting to middle schoolers by writing about things that interest them. And, guess what? It worked. I keep hearing from teachers how kids get so into these passages. They actually want to answer the questions. They even want to discuss the articles as a group. 

And teachers keep reporting how much time and hassle I have saved them. I did that by aligning every text and task to a specific Reading Informational Text Standard and did that 10 times to cover all 10 of them individually. Now teachers don’t have to go searching for the right articles that bring out the right skills.

Think back for a second to recall your favorite class of all time, or at least a favorite teacher. Did the teacher have a genuinely warm smile that put you at ease? Was he or she funny sometimes? Was the classroom atmosphere somewhat light? Even fun every now and then? The answers to these questions may be no, but I’m guessing that most of them, if not all, are yes.

The point is that in that favorite class, or around that favorite teacher, is where you associated education with joy. In the pleasant atmospheres, you learned better. You remembered longer. What if your class were more like this? My rule #3 for teaching middle school will teach you how. I have some ideas that can help you bring joy into learning today.

Here’s another trick I learned. When you provide your students with high-interest learning resources they feel are relevant to them and interesting in some way, they will actually behave better. They will get sucked into whatever you are trying to get them read, write, or do and forget about misbehaving.

So, that’s why I created these high-interest informational texts and tasks. I went out of my way to make the articles super interesting to middle schoolers by writing about things that interest them. And, guess what? It worked. I keep hearing from teachers how kids get so into these passages. They actually want to answer the questions. They even want to discuss the articles as a group. 

And teachers keep reporting how much time and hassle I have saved them. I did that by aligning every text and task to a specific Reading Informational Text Standard and did that 10 times to cover all 10 of them individually. Now teachers don’t have to go searching for the right articles that bring out the right skills. That’s why I made Volume II for middle school, then workbooks for 4th grade, 5th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, and 11th grade. 12th grade is coming Fall 2021.