How to Alternate Your Units in Middle School ELA

Every year, one of the biggest stressors is looking at pages of standards and knowing you have 180 days to teach it all. It can make your head spin wondering how to teach every genre and get through every unit. Luckily, there is a way to make it work with some careful planning (and positive mantras don’t hurt either). When you alternate your units in middle school ELA, your life will be changed forever.

How to Teach All The Genres

It is possible to squeeze all the content you need to teach into one school year. The key is starting with a curriculum map. You may have been provided one by your school, but if not – I have free pacing guides for all middle school grades.

I wrote a blog post recently about how I craft these pacing guides, but essentially, you need to start with your core content and standards. What are the big genres and topics you have to teach during the school year?

For instance, your students need to be familiar with fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Of course, there are many subgenres within those, but those are the big main topics to cover.

Your students also need to learn different writing genres, grammar rules, and vocabulary. I consider all of these items and craft my pacing guide around the standards and skills I need to teach.

[insert image of pacing guide]

Now here’s the kicker – obviously you will not be able to fit reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary into a 45-minute class period. In order to hit all of these skills, you need to alternate units. This will allow you to teach every genre and meet each standard.

Creating an ELA Unit Plan

When people ask me, “How do you teach genres?!” My answer is simple: alternating them. Like I said, you can’t fit reading and writing + everything else into one class (at least, not very effectively).

When I created my ELA pacing guide, I organized it by month. This is what made sense to me, but you could also easily organize your ELA curriculum by six weeks or nine weeks.

The best way for me to explain alternating is by showing you!

This is the middle school ELA curriculum map I created for 7th grade. At the top, you can see I have the months listed, and down the side are the key skills for the year. The colors across the curriculum map give you a great visual of alternating. It also breaks down a pace for how to alternate your units in middle school ELA.

From August through October, you can see the pink boxes. These are all fiction units, specifically realistic fiction, that I am alternating and weaving throughout that time frame. Next in the orange, you have historical fiction. Yellow is short stories, and so on.

You can see at this quick scope and sequence for the year that I have a unit for fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama planned throughout the year (some genres even have multiple units!).

An important thing to remember is that when you are working on a nonfiction unit, for instance, it doesn’t mean you can’t touch on other genres. It just means that within that unit, nonfiction would be the focus. Comparing and reading other texts and genres together is always encouraged.

Okay, now let’s look at how this would look on a daily and weekly basis.

In the weekly and daily breakdown (this is also included in the free ELA curriculum maps), I have the daily components of mentor text, ELA lesson, and vocab/grammar.

These four weeks will give you a good idea of how alternating units work. In the first two weeks, you can see that we are in the middle of a realistic fiction unit. I have planned out by the day exactly what skills we will focus on: theme, figurative language, central idea, etc. along with the standard and the mentor text (in this case, Freak the Mighty).

In the third week, we shift from a reading unit to a writing unit. We are still talking about fiction, but now instead of purely reading fiction, we are writing it. We have alternated to a Narrative Essays unit.

Freak the Mighty is still the mentor text in this unit because it will be used as a model and example for students as they write their own narrative essays.

When the narrative essays end on the last day of this page, the next week will begin a Historical Fiction reading unit.

By alternating back and forth from a reading unit to a writing unit, we can be sure that students are covering all of the skills and standards necessary for each genre. That’s what I mean by alternating is the answer to how to teach genres!

Alright, so you might be thinking – but what about the vocabulary and grammar skills? Where do you squeeze that in? You’ll notice in the grammar and vocab section of each week that I have mentor sentences listed. 

Mentor sentences are a great way to introduce grammar skills, and they become great models for your writing units. I typically complete mentor sentences with students during our warm-ups or stations. I have mentor sentence units that you can easily plug into your curriculum map.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with all the standards and things to teach, I highly recommend downloading my free middle school ELA curriculum maps! I promise it’ll help you make sense of how to teach genre and alternate units.

I also have an editable curriculum map, so you can move pieces around to fit your classroom needs!