326: Writing Engagement Starts Day One—Here’s How I Hook Them

In this episode of Teaching Middle School ELA, Caitlin flips the script on traditional first-day activities by making the case for launching your writing unit on day one — yes, really! While students may still be groggy and navigating the chaos of a new school year, Caitlin shares how to spark curiosity and get them excited about writing right from the start. You’ll learn a simple yet powerful strategy to build engagement and confidence before diving into structure and essays, setting the tone for meaningful writing all year long.

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Transcript

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Hello teachers, Caitlin here, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. All right, I know that the words writing unit and day one of school don't usually belong in the same sentence. We know it is busy for students, they're figuring out their locker combos, who their friends are, where they're eating for lunch, all of those things, right? But the thing is, engagement with writing really can start from that very first day. And it doesn't have to be something boring. And in fact, it shouldn't be boring at all. It should be the complete opposite of that. So in today's episode, I am sharing exactly how you can hook your students with writing from day one before you ever talk about tag or premises or body paragraphs or whatever it is, and how you can use this same strategy to spark curiosity, build confidence, and lay the groundwork for powerful writing all year long. All right, let's dive into today's episode. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher digital planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. So don't get me wrong, I love a good rubric, and structure is essential for strong writing. If you're a part of our EB writing program, you know this. But if we hand students a rubric on day one and say, all right, this is what needs to be included in an essay, you are going to lose them immediately. And hopefully, if you listen to this podcast episode, that's not the type of teacher that you are. But if you are, I'm gonna invite you to do something different this year and try something to like zhuzh it up a little bit. And this is why before we ever introduce the foundational elements of the EBW approach, and if you don't know what EBW stands for, it stands for evidence-based writing. It is our foundational writing style here at EB. And before we ever introduce tag, claim, premise, evidence, justification, we're always gonna start with a hook, with a unit as a whole that's a hook for writing. So this is something fun, something mysterious, something that gets them thinking like writers before they even realize that they're actually doing it. And that is where our detective lessons and our escape room challenges come into play. So I'm going to give you one of my absolute favorite ways to kick off the school year. And in fact, a lot of our staff at EB, who are still classroom teachers, use this and they love it, and their students do too. And this is especially important before you dive into formal writing instruction. So we're not just gonna start with, all right, this is the EBW approach. A tag stands for title, author, genre. We're gonna lose our students and bore the hell out of them. So instead, we're going to start with a mystery lesson called The Case of the Stolen Pearls. And this is a detective hook that teaches justification to our students and a lot of the other components of writing without them even knowing that that's what's actually happening. So here's how it works. And I'm gonna give you a link to grab this resource for free as well. So students are grouped into detective agencies and they read a short, engaging mystery about a stolen necklace at a high school, and they are challenged to figure out well, who is the thief? So the suspects are a music director, a basketball coach, and the assistant. So each of these players has potential motives, alibis, suspicious details, and it's up to your students to crack the case, right? To figure out who the thief is. But here's the real brilliance of the activity. There is a correct answer to this one, but that's not actually our end goal for our students. They think that's what it is. But the true objective is teaching our students how to support a claim using clear reasoning, which would be a premise, direct evidence, and justification, all without the pressure of actually writing a formal essay. So as you can see, they're really like writing an essay, but not, right? They're formulating a claim, reasoning, evidence, justification. So students are going to complete an evidence tracker where they state a claim, which is who they think stole the necklace. They are gonna provide two premises, so reasons that support their claim. They'll have a backup premise, or though I'm sorry, they'll have to back up each premise with a direct quote from the story, which is their evidence. And then finally, they're gonna use a two-sentence justification formula to tie the evidence back to their reasoning. And that formula is what makes this lesson so powerful and really is starting to like lay the groundwork of this is how we're going to operate with writing in this classroom. So the first sentence of their justification connects the evidence to the premise. They're explaining how this quote supports their reason. Well, then the second sentence needs to make all of that connect to the claim. So, how does this quote, how does your reasoning support the claim? So, for example, you could use sentence stems for, you know, very simply doing this the first time. This supports the premise because this supports the claim because. Obviously, we will get rid of those eventually. But if your students need those training wheels, there's nothing wrong with giving them that, especially at the beginning of the year. And what's great is that this is simple. It gets immediately students thinking about writing like detectives. They're using logic, evidence, clear reasoning. And then once students fill in the tracker, they're gonna write like a formal case report. And this is essentially a fully structured argumentative paragraph. And they're gonna do all of this without even realizing that what they're doing is rigorous and standards aligned writing, right? I love it. This is how we get our students excited about writing without even knowing. That's the magic. They're excited about the mystery, right? They're working together, they're learning to justify their ideas with textual evidence. And ultimately, they're internalizing a method that they're gonna use all year long in your class, whether they're analyzing characters or arguing a point or actually writing formal responses to literature. And the lesson hits the standards reading for literature 7.1 and writing 7.1 beautifully, and that's for the seventh grade, but you can also tie this down into sixth and fifth and also up into eighth. The standards don't change a whole heck of a lot between the grade levels. So it teaches citing evidence, building logical arguments, justifying claims. I love, absolutely love it. And trust me, once students start tossing around phrases like, well, what's your premise or what's your evidence, or justify your reasoning, you'll know that you've really laid the foundation for deep, meaningful writing because they're gonna want to make sure that someone who's arguing for, you know, the suspect that they didn't think did it, for them to say, Well, what's your premise? Where's the evidence that supports that, right? I love it. So you can actually go grab this lesson for free at ebteacher.com forward slash pearls and use it that very first week of school. Okay, I want to give you one more first week favorite, and that is our literary analysis escape room. So this one will be a little bit shorter of me explaining it. So this one focuses more on reading, comprehension, and plot structure, but it still reinforces foundational writing skills like citing evidence, making inferences, and working collaboratively to solve complex tasks. So the magic of this is when students play their way into a text through puzzles, problem solving, there's a bit of competition included, they're actually more invested when it's time to write about it later. So that investment means better engagement, and better engagement leads to better writing. So even though we're not explicitly teaching essay structure yet, we're building all the prerequisite thinking skills that they need for success later in the school year. So here is the best part of it. I'm gonna give you that exact escape room for free, and I'm gonna walk you through exactly how to use it during that first crucial week or two of school and how to create an environment where students are excited to dive into learning from day one. And I'm gonna do that at my June workshop that I'm hosting. So you're gonna get each piece of this escape room unit, and I'm gonna do a live with you to walk you through exactly how to get the most out of it with your students. So you don't have to come to the live necessarily, but I suggest that you do, and that's where you're gonna get the download for the resource. So if you grab your spot at ebteacher.com forward slash workshop, um, I'll put the link for you in the show notes as well. And make sure that you join my Facebook group after you've signed up for the workshop because that's where I'm gonna give this particular um resource. All right, so I have a main live workshop, but then I'm also doing bonus trainings. And these bonus trainings are where I'm gonna be teaching you exactly how to use this escape room unit with your students. All right, so you might be thinking, well, Caitlin, that's fun, but I don't have time for fluff. So these lessons are not fluff, they are extremely foundational. They build student buy-in, they establish routines, they show students that writing is really about thinking. It's not just following a formula. And that way, when we do move into formal structure writing, right, with the EBW approach, when we're introducing tag, claim, all of that stuff, students already kind of know this common language. So they've done it in the mystery, right? They've cracked the codes in the escape room, and now they're transferring those same skills into more academic writing, right? That's the goal. Build their confidence first, then we're gonna give them the structure and kind of like the not boring stuff, but maybe the not as exciting stuff later. Okay. All right, so again, I want to invite you to join me for my workshop in June. It is a totally free student engagement workshop for middle school ELA teachers, ebteacher.com forward slash workshop. And it's all about creating engaging standards-aligned classroom lessons from day one. So again, you're gonna get that ready-to-use escape room that you can implement that first week or two of school. I'm gonna give you a clear walkthrough of how to spark curiosity and collaboration and also a practical framework for you to make all of this doable because creating engaging standards-aligned lessons can feel overwhelming, but it doesn't have to. All right, go ahead and grab your spot, go to evteacher.com forward slash workshop. And if you loved this episode and it sparked some new ideas for you, I'd love for you to share it with a colleague or leave us a review on iTunes. That would mean a lot to me. Um, and don't forget to go register for the Gene Workshop. All right, until next time, hope you guys are enjoying the end of the year or your summer. If you are one of those lucky teachers who is already on summer break, I'll see you guys next week on the podcast.