The Article of the Week: Middle School Lesson Ideas
AOW stands for article of the week. We have been doing AOW’s for years, ever since we read about them in Kelly Gallagher’s book, Deeper Reading. If you haven’t read that book or any of his books for that matter, they are must reads for all secondary English teachers.
We assign an AOW article at the beginning of each week. What’s that? Where do we find articles? Well, we like to pull from real news sources like the Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, The Atlantic, etc. - all the good news sources. We look for articles that are two pages or less and focus on interesting topics to engage our students, but also teach them a thing or two. Another way to find the best article of the week is to take a look at Kelly Gallagher’s website where he posts all of his AOW articles for his high school students. Dave Stuart also does a great job posting his article of the week into two categories: time sensitive articles and timeless articles.
We work as a grade level department to pick the articles each week, so that every student in that grade level reads the same article. Once we have the article of the week picked out, we give students the week to read the article for homework and take notes on the article of the week worksheet which is aligned to the common core reading standards. So, bonus!
On Friday, students use their notes to write an on-demand writing prompt that focuses again on the common core informational reading and writing standards. We also have two weekly RTI tutorials, so we offer AOW support lessons each week. They are the most popular tutorial sign ups at our school!
We find that this weekly homework lesson is best started after you have explicitly taught each of the informational reading standards,. This weekly assignment helps to reinforce the learning of those standards. We think this homework assignment is a huge contributor to our students growing exponentially in their reading and writing skills, which in turn shows great dividends on the state exam.
