What is Classroom in the Middle? Classroom in the Middle is a blog and a store all about language arts resources for middle school and upper elementary. In the blog, you’ll find a big (and growing) collection of teaching ideas and activities, along with freebies that you can download at any time, for English teachers in the middle grades. In the store, you will see both free resources and resources for sale including ready-to-use printables and presentations.
The blog articles are in five categories:
Seasonal and Holidays
and Other Good Stuff
Here are a few examples of what you can find there, starting with reading. This post, as you can see includes teaching ideas for figurative language and imagery. One of the ideas is about using picture books to introduce figures of speech and includes suggested picture book titles.
This post in the writing section, includes suggestions for specific changes that students can make as they revise their paper. The possibilities range from simple changes like replacing adjectives with more interesting ones to more complex ones like adding a few lines of dialog.
Solving Seven Types of Analogies, a post in the vocabulary section, provides a helpful way to organize analogy lessons with examples of seven specific types of analogies.
Mixed in with the articles on the blog, you will find links to free mini-posters that you can download and links to more freebies that you can pick up at any time from Classroom in the Middle’s store.
The teaching resources at Classroom in the Middle, a Teachers pay Teachers store, fall into a number of categories, all essential teaching areas for language arts teachers. They include these categories:
As an example, in the novel studies category, you will find these three resources for the middle grades novel, Pictures of Hollis Woods. As you can see, the third one is a freebie, in case you would like to try it out. You can find out more about any of the resources by viewing its preview.
In Classroom in the Middle’s store, there is always one featured free resource. At the moment, this informational text activity, Let it Snow, is featured. It includes a one page magazine-style reading with a page of multiple choice questions and another printable activity sheet. You will see that the focus of this one is text features and other reading comprehension skills.
What Is Classroom in the Middle? Check it out for yourself!