Text dependent writing

I first heard about these a few years ago when close reading was starting to become a thing. My fabulous Literacy Specialist was helping me wrap my brain around how to do close readings and she brought me a fabulous resource by Jackson Consulting that had pages of text-dependent questions. They were ways to get students back into the text in small, user-friendly chunks.

Students need to be taught how to read complex texts. One of the strategies for learning how is close reading . It slows the reader down t...

Teachers and students rely on the RACE or RACES writing strategies to construct high-quality answers using text evidence.

These sentence stems, bookmarks, and mini-posters are so versatile. Use the posters for a bulletin board to help students answer text dependent analysis questions and cite text evidence from reading passages. The bookmarks are handy references. These constructed response writing stems are the beginn...

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Show Me the Evidence strips: These have great evidence stems to help students cite specific evidence in their written responses/discussions.

Do your students struggle with finding and citing text evidence? Check out this post for text evidence activities, tips, and strategies (with freebies).

Informational Text Anchor chart

Text dependent analysis writing asks students to provide specific evidence from a literary text. Here's how I help my students through that struggle.

Are you working on opinion or persuasive writing styles with your students? This infographic will help you break down the differences! Click through for more tips to teaching paragraph writing!

Today, I'm here to tell you guys about one of my favorite lessons to teach! It's my Citing Text Evidence Intro Lesson!! CCSS RL1 and RI1 are all about answering questions using text evidence! This lesson is perfect for test prep, especially since PARCC is filled with text evidence questions! Text evidence is always super hard for my third graders, y'all. They don't have a lot of experience citing evidence when they come to me, so an explicit lesson about text evidence is a MUST! So here's…

Types of text poster featuring informational and literary texts.

Preparing students for testing means preparing them for how to study. In this post, I share how students use RACES to compose constructed responses.

While writing our literary analysis essays, I noticed my students struggled with introducing their textual evidence. They just kind of plopped it in without introducing it or setting up the context of the evidence. To fix this up, today when we revised our draft for transitions, I threw in some teaching about transitions to use to introduce textual evidence. It definitely helped! #middleschoolela #iteachmiddle

We all know that close reading is the buzz in education right now. And I've read so many AMAZING blog posts about the whys and hows of close reading. But I haven't read much about the text-dependent questions that are a MUST along with close reading. So, since I've just finished reading Rigorous Reading: 5 Access Points for Comprehending Complex Texts (Corwin Literacy) by Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher, I'm going to post my quick thoughts about text-dependent questions. And I'd love to hear…

This resource prepares students for writing a text-dependent argumentative essay and is designed to meet the expectations of various state writing tests. Throughout this engaging writing unit students will read a text, find evidence for use in their essays, use sentence frames to cite evidence in their writing, and write a complete text-dependent argumentative essay. 6th grade writing, argumentative writing, writing test prep, 6th grade test prep, 6th grade argumentative writing test prep

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I remember my first encounter with paired passages WITHOUT fondness. These texts showed up on my students’ 5th grade writing assessment one year and it was definitely stress-inducing. I thought to myself, “This is more than just teaching writing. I have to teach close reading along with writing!” Now that I’ve been teaching paired passages […]

Struggling to teach paragraph writing? Using the hamburger paragraph writing templates for elementary students is engaging and effective!

This is the third in a three-post series about TDQs. Read the other two posts here and here. We’ve covered[…]Continue Reading