Why Teach 7th and 8th Grade Students Nouns?

The ability to determine that a basketball is a common, singular, concrete noun seems like a relatively useless parlor trick.  Though there appears to be little value in knowing this, I believe that this is fundamental to learning the more valuable skills of understanding sentence structure, punctuation, and grammar.  When I was in high school, I remember struggling to write papers.  Not because I didn't have any good ideas to express, but because my understanding of sentence structure was poor enough to limit my expression.  Since I didn't have mastery of punctuation, I found myself rewording my ideas just to fit in the few templates that I had mastered.  For this reason, I believe it is important to teach students about parts of speech and, ultimately, how to clearly and fluently express their ideas in writing.  So I start at the beginning with my 7th and 8th grade students.  I figure that if they don't know how to recognize nouns and verbs, they won't learn to identify subjects and predicates.  If they don't learn to identify subjects and predicates, they won't be able to understand clauses and punctuation rules.  I never presume that my job has been done for me, so I reteach my students nouns, even if they claim to have mastery.  I find that teaching my seventh and eighth grade students more advanced information about nouns seems to raise their interest and the value of my lesson.  Therefore, I show them concrete and abstract nouns.  I teach them when one should add just an apostrophe an no "s" to show possession.  And I fuse these concepts along with the basics into one quick lesson.  After we have covered the basics, I have them practice identifying nouns with these noun worksheets, and then we move on to verbs. 

Teaching Idioms

Teaching students to understand idiomatic expressions is complicated by two factors.  First, idioms are often cliched examples of other figurative language techniques.  For example, "Reminding Tommy to stay in his seat was like beating a dead horse."  This idiom is actually a simile.  The only distinction that this simile has is that it has been used so frequently that it is now cliched and, hence, an idiom.  The second complicating factor is that most elementary students have had little exposure to the many antiquated idioms floating around in the language.  If a student cannot recognize that an expression is commonly used in language art large, that students will have difficulty identifying (and understanding) idioms. 

However, I do not believe that these complications are insurmountable.  The best way to prepare students to recognize and interpret idioms is to give them exposure to idioms.  Given enough leading context, thoughtful students should be able to decode the most cryptic and archaic idioms.  Fortunately, I've gathered many of the commonly used idioms and presented them into double-sided worksheets with which students can gain more practice identifying and interpreting idioms.  Visit my website now for free idiom worksheets.

Teaching Students to Identify Themes

One of the more challenging skills that I've attempted to teach my students is how to identify the themes in stories.  In the past, I defined the term, provided an example or two, and asked students to identify the theme in a story.  Then we would hit a wall.  Some students would readily locate and express challenging themes in texts, and some just wouldn't be able to wrap their heads around the concept.  I would become frustrated, and we would move onto something like homophones, homonyms, and homographs.  But this year I had something of a breakthrough: by teaching students theme in the more understandable terms of "the big world lesson" and "the small world of the story," I was able to reach more of my students this year than in the past.  Using this new method of teaching theme, I resolved some of the problems that my students were having with understanding theme.  The last challenge I faced was giving students enough practice with identifying themes that they would reliably identify themes in texts.  Immediately after learning theme, students need more practice identifying themes than one story can provide.  So while we attempted to identify the theme in each text that we studied as a class throughout the year, I found it useful to compile very short stories into theme worksheets, where students would read examples, identify themes, and explain their answers.  I hope that these methods and resources will help your students to better identify themes in texts, and thanks for paying attention.

Mortini

Teaching Fact and Opinion

Identifying statements of fact and statements of opinion is a skill that is frequently evaluated on state tests.  I find that students often get hung up trying to determine whether a factual statement is true or false.  If they believe that the statement is false, they may be reluctant to label said statement as a fact. because many people are conditioned to associate the term "fact" with the idea of "true" or "correct."  A good way that I have found to break students of this habit, which may do them harm come test time, is to teach the concepts of fact and opinion in the following way.

Teach students that facts can be true or false.  Students should be taught that a factual statement is one that can be proven to be true or false, and that statements of opinion cannot be proven.  For example, I may say "Mr. Mortini is ten feet tall.  This is a statement of fact.  We can all see that it is a fact that is false, but we can easily prove it to be false, therefore it is factual.  Now, if I said that Mr. Mortini is tall, this would be an opinion.  A person who is shorter than Mr. Mortini might agree with this statement, but a person who is taller than Mr. Mortini would likely disagree.  Since there is no way to prove the statement beyond argument, it is a statement opinion." By teaching students that facts can be true or false, they will stop wasting energy trying to determine whether facts are accurate and focus their efforts on distinguishing between statements that can be proven and cannot be proven.

Teach students that opinions can be supported with facts.  Students may continue to struggle with the notion of proving an opinion.  For example, if I make the statement, "Drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth tastes bad," some students will argue that this is a fact.  I will ask, "Why?  How can you prove this?"  They will respond by saying that when they had done it in the past it tasted bad (personal experience), or that we could have a random sample of people do it and all of them will agree (polling).  I point out that this may be a very popular opinion, but that it is still an opinion.  Or I will point out that the statement was not, "10 out of 10 people I asked agree that orange juice tastes bad after brushing your teeth."  I tell them to respond to the statement that was posed, not to over think it.  Then, I show them how facts can be used to support opinions.  1.  Michael Jordan averaged over 30 points a game.  2.  Michael Jordan averaged over 2 steals a game.  3.  Therefore, Michael Jordan is one of the best basketball players ever.  I show them how we can prove the first two points to be true or not true, thereby making them fact, but that the third statement could never be proven.  It can be supported, but not proven.


Give students practice identifying statements of fact and statement of opinion.   I created a couple of worksheets that should prove helpful in this task.  They are double-sided and contain 25 statements each. Go to ereadingworksheets now to check them out: fact and opinion worksheets, and may you have great success in teaching your students to distinguish between facts and opinions.

Increase Your Students' Reading Test Scores

I've been a Chicago Public School teacher for six years now, and according to ISAT data (the Illinois state test that elementary school students take) my students have demonstrated remarkable growth.  My reading classes are averaging growth of 12.5% each year, and I believe that these scores reflect authentic learning, not an increase in test taking skills.  Additionally, 95% of my students are classified as "low-income," so I'm not producing this growth in some candy land suburb where teachers have the benefits of technology and materials.

The way I produce this growth is by focusing my instruction on the skills that my state (and probably your state too) has articulated that students should know at their grade level.  Skills like identifying text structure, figurative language, or the narrator's view point, to name a few.  When trying to buy or find materials on the internet that would provide my students with the necessary practice to become adept at these skills, I found a paucity of available materials, and the materials I did find seemed to lack in quality or were not rigorous enough.  So, I created my own.  The combination of effective teaching strategies and quality resources have proven successful in providing my students with useful literary skills that just so happen to be evaluated on state tests.  
 
Hoping to help and inspire other educators, I have now made my materials freely available at my website, ereadingworksheets.com.  For each assignment I include PDF files (for perfect printing), RTF files (so that you may edit each assignment to fit your needs or to personalize the assignments), and HTM files (so that you may preview each worksheet in your browser before downloading the file).  Responses from users have been overwhelmingly positive, but I still have big plans for improving and expanding the site, particularly in the realm of elearning or creating true electronic worksheets using Adobe Captivate.  If you are a reading, English, writing, or language arts teacher looking for free materials or just some inspiration, please visit ereadingworksheets.com to access a wealth of resources.