Using Articles of the Week to Improve Writing

Are you maximizing your bell ringer time?  Today, teaching has become a race against the clock.  There's never enough time! This is why we must be deliberate about the bell ringers we choose to use in our classrooms.  Carefully planned bell ringers provide students with opportunities to work authentically with both reading and writing.  Articles of the Week (AoW) is an important strategy teachers can use to support readers and writers during this time.

A large problem with students today is they don't understand texts well enough to write about them, especially informational texts.  As teachers of writing, we often have students dive right in and start writing, without taking this into account.  This explains why students' writing often lacks focus and clarity. Writing is thinking.  If students don't understand the text, they are unable to write about it.  

In practicing writing, we must give students multiple opportunities to work with a text before they write about it. One way to do this is to create Articles of the Week, or find existing Articles of the Week, in your classrooms.  Kelly Gallagher, a leading expert on building deeper readers and writers, suggests using Articles of the Week to help students gain access to the text.

Where Can I Find Articles of the Week?

The good news is, if you teach grades 5-12, there are already a lot of pre-made materials out there! Vale Middle School, Holmes Middle School, and Riverside Middle School offer a full archive of ready-to-use AoWs.  Other sites, such as Brooks Middle School and Scholastic, provide texts to use for middle-schoolers.  There are numerous resources available for High School students too.  Gallagher, Stuart, and Schotz offer paired texts to create your own AoWs activities. Springville High School and Avon High School offer articles with text-based questions.  I have created my own materials for 5th grade students using a variety of Scholastic articles.  I've uploaded week 1 in Scribd for your benefit.

5th Grade, Article of the Week #1

Making Your Own Articles of the Week

If you are like me and you wanted to tailor your AoWs to your classes specific needs, you need to create your own.  It's easy.

1. Choose an article on an appropriate lexile for your students.  If you know you are going to use an article for an upcoming writing assignment, using it as an AoW provides students with an opportunity to work with the text before they write about it.  I use the snipit tool to capture images and insert them in my document.
2. Identify reading and writing skills you want students to practice.
3. Chunk skills by days of the week, keeping in mind you want them to accomplish the daily bell ringer in 5-7 minutes. 
4. Create text-dependent questions and skills questions for each day of the week.  

AoWs are an ideal way to provide students with multiple opportunities to work with informational texts.  The more students work with texts, the more successful experiences they will have with writing.