For any long-term research paper with middle schoolers, I like to provide the students with a step-by-step planning document. Their job is to look at their calendar and to fill in the dates that they should finish each step. After each step is completed, they bring the paper to school, show me the completed elements, and get my signature.

This approach had mixed results the first time around. The most organized and motivated students found it to be a good way of keeping track of their progress and getting continual feedback. Other students lost the sheet and still tried to do everything at the last minute, even though the project required process feedback. I hope the more I use this type of planning sheet, the more the students will get used to it and take responsibility for their own planning. If the students had laptops, I'd shift this planning sheet to Trello or another online platform.

While teaching IGCSE Literature, I wanted to give my grade 9 students a broad yet deep understanding of the historical and personal contexts in which Shakespeare's Macbeth was written. I had also realized that many students had weak paraphrasing  and summary skills, so behold the "Para-Pres" assignment.

In this project, I photocopied and cut up the sections from Stephen Greenblatt's introduction to the Norton anthology of Shakespeare's tragedies. You could use any college-level scholarly introduction.  Each section is between 1 and 3 pages. For my highest-level students who needed a challenge, I also added one full-length critical article, Greenblatt's "Renaissance Self-Fashioning."

On the first day, I gave the students their assigned jigsaw reading sections in pairs. Their first goal was to create a poster, using note-taking and paraphrase skills. Their second goal was to give a poster presentation on the main points of their context area.

In order to check the paraphrasing work, students had to create a draft before making the final poster. This involved a lot of me running around the room, checking individual passages against the original and getting students to rewrite.

See below some of the finished presentation posters, which were then recycled to make a classroom bulletin board for reference during the Macbeth unit. You can use this assignment with any jigsaw reading. Here's an editable version of the Para-Pres rubric. Make a copy and make it your own! You will see that the majority of the points in this rubric go toward the writing and creating the poster, and only 20% is on presentation skills. Adjust the weight of each category or add specific presentation skills if you want to prioritize the oral presentation aspect of the assignment.

One thing I love to work on with my middle school writers is how to write a fantastic first line. First we start by brainstorming what type of things might make an interesting first line. Then, I set out copies of the "50 Best First Lines in Fiction" as collated by Gawker.

Each student or pair of students choose a line that they find interesting. Then, they use the First Line Analysis Worksheet to think about why the line grabbed their attention. What senses did it appeal to? What information did it give away about the novel? What tone did it set?

I set all of these fantastic first lines and analysis up as a bulletin board for students to review. Then, when they write their own first lines, we continue to workshop them until they have that punch. Finally, I choose the strongest one and run a contest, asking other students which novel they would be most likely to read, based on just the first line.

The students had so much fun voting.

50 Best First Lines in Fiction - Printable
First Line Analysis Worksheet
First Lines Bulletin Board