Episode Details

This week's Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast episode, The part of an ELA unit that students remember least is often the part we teach most: the long middle where they’re “doing the reading.” We’re not okay with that, because the during-reading phase is where real comprehension, analysis, and confidence get built or lost. So we’re sharing three practical “hidden gems” that make the middle of a text feel active, purposeful, and genuinely engaging for students.

First up: emoji annotations. We walk you through a simple icon key that turns annotation into a visual scavenger hunt for character, figurative language, theme or main idea, personal connections, shock moments, opinions, and lingering questions. It works for short stories and novel study, and we also talk through easy swaps like sticky notes or an annotation log when kids can’t write in books.

Then we shift into discussion stations, a flexible station rotation that replaces the same old whole-class chapter talk. Four stations, three questions each, clear focus at every stop, plus sentence stems that help students actually respond to each other with evidence. Finally, we share six-word memoir trading cards, a creative but rigorous character activity that doubles as a mid-novel checkpoint and an end-of-book reflection, perfect for tracking character arc changes over time.

If you want during reading activities that boost student engagement and strengthen literary analysis, hit play, then subscribe, share with a fellow ELA teacher, and leave a review so more teachers can find the show.