Episode 395: A 5-Minute Women’s History Month Writing Routine

Want to honor Women’s History Month without adding another unit to your already packed schedule? In today's Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode, Caitlin shares a simple five-minute writing routine that helps students practice essential ELA skills while learning about remarkable female athletes like Simone Biles, Chloe Kim, and Katie Ledecky. It’s quick, meaningful, and easy to fit into your existing warm-up time—no extra planning required. If you’re looking for a way to bring real-world inspiration into your classroom while strengthening writing skills, this routine might be the perfect place to start. 

Transcript

March, Morale, And Meaning

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Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad that you are here today, especially if you are listening to this right when it airs at the beginning of March. And if you teach middle school ELA, you know what March feels like. It is a difficult month sometimes to get through, especially if there's no vacation days at all. And it's also Women's History Month. And I think it's really important that we find a way to incorporate Women's History Month into our classrooms and we do it in a meaningful way, but at the same time in a way that doesn't impact your batch plans or state testing coming down the pipeline or whatever it is. So even though it's a crazy month, it is Women's History Month, and we can do something really neat in our classrooms without really impacting what we already have planned. So I'm gonna walk you through an idea that you can use today. It's really a simple five-minute writing routine. It's something you could literally start tomorrow or today if you were headed into school. And it lets you and your students honor some of the most remarkable female athletes of our time, but it also helps your students with their writing skills. So there's no extra planning, no new unit, you don't even have to grade anything. It's just a really simple, repeatable, either daily or you can do it weekly routine that fits right into what you're already doing. So 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. Alright, now I call this idea the athlete spotlight quick write. And the basic structure is really simple. At the start of your class, or whenever you would normally do like your bell work or your warm-up or something like that, you can project onto your screen a short snippet about a female athlete. You could even have Claude or Chat GPT write this for you. You could find a quick video online to show your students. And we're talking really short, right? Students read a very short snippet or they watch a very short video, and we give them one writing prompt that's connected to a skill that you're already currently teaching or that you have already taught that year, this year rather, and they're gonna write for five minutes, and that's literally it. So it's not this huge lesson, you don't have packets or anything like that that you have to do no rubrics. It's just a very powerful real-world story about a famous female athlete, and you are using that story as a vehicle to practice skills that your students need. So you could focus on things like identifying theme or writing a main idea sentence or making a claim about an athlete with evidence. You can even author, uh, analyze the author's tone. And so what I like about this is that it um supports your current writing instruction, right? It's something that you're already doing and you're just enhancing it and adding to it to honor Women's History Month. So I want to give you a couple examples that you can use. These, they're five incredible female athletes, and it encompasses five different writing skills. So you can see exactly what this looks like in practice, and you can take this and use it yourself. Um, and this should be in the transcript of the podcast recording, so you don't have to like write down everything that I'm saying. You can just go to the transcript and copy and paste it and use it in your classroom. So, someone your students most certainly already know is Simone Biles. And a short passage that you might read aloud or project for your class is the following. And again, you can take this from the transcript. During the Tokyo Olympics, Simone Biles withdrew from several events to protect her mental health. Instead of pushing through intense pressure, she chose to prioritize her long-term well-being. Later, she returned to competition and continued winning medals. That's it. Very short passage. You kind of start to see how succinct I'm speaking when I talk about this. And then you're gonna give students a prompt such as the following What theme is revealed in Simone Biles' decision? Use one detail from the passage to support your answer. Students write for five minutes. You can even put a timer in your classroom if you want to. And that's a theme lesson, right? That's a theme on lessons, or that's a lesson on theme. Students are using textual evidence practice. It's connected to a story about a real woman making a courageous choice to put her mental health first, which, by the way, is a conversation that is worth having with our middle schoolers, anyhow, right? So the writing skill and the story work together really well. And that's kind of the magic of structuring it this way. So that's example number one. Example number two is about Michaela Schifrin and incorporating the main idea. And she is one of the most decorated alpine skiers in history. And here is again the passage that you can use. And this should be in the transcript. I'll make sure it's in the show notes for you. So you again can just copy and paste it. Michaela Schiffrin is one of the most successful alpine skiers in history. After facing personal loss and Olympic setbacks, she continued competing and breaking records through years of discipline and determination. That's the passage. And the writing prompt would be write one sentence that clearly states the central idea of this passage. That's it. It's simple, it's focused. And the main idea is one of those skills that is kind of hard for a lot of students, especially when they want to like summarize the whole thing or zoom in on one tiny detail. But this gives them a really small, bite-sized passage to practice on. And it's also a meaningful story to anchor their thinking. So you can show, like a little YouTube clip about Michaela Schiffrin, and you can also project this short passage onto your screen and give them that writing prompt. It's just like I'm it's just so simple, right? It's just the simplest, most impactful way, I feel like, to ensure that we are honoring incredible women during this month and we are also pulling in skills that we're already doing with our students. Um, example number three is Chloe Kim and using claims and evidence. So Chloe Kim won Olympic gold in snowboarding's half pipe when she was just 17 years old, which is pretty cool if you ask me. And the passage, again, can be super short. Chloe Kim won Olympic gold in snowboarding's halfpipe at just 17 years old. After stepping away from competition for a time, she returned to the sport and won again. So the prompt would be write a claim about perseverance or resilience. Use one detail from the passage as evidence. So now you're doing basically argument writing in miniature, right? Students are making a claim, they're backing it up with those are core skills that they're gonna need on state assessments, and they're gonna need it when they get to high school English. And they're doing it in five minutes with a super cool story about snowboarding and this 17-year-old girl. Like that's pretty cool. And if you think about for that for a second, like Chloe Kim stepped away from a sport that she dominated and then she came back and won again. Like that is a story worth sharing, worth writing about. Students can connect to that and relate to that. Um, example number four. I love this girl, Eileen Goo, and argument writing. This is our fourth example. And she is a freestyle skier and has won a ton of Olympic medals. And the passage, again, is super short. Freestyle skier Eileen Gu is known not only for winning Olympic medals, but also for balancing academics, modeling, and global influence while competing at the highest level. And the prompt, and I love this one because it sparks real discussion, is the following. Should elite athletes focus only on their sport or should they pursue multiple interests? Write a short paragraph defending your position. So now your students, again, are practicing argument and reasoning. They're taking a stance, they're defending their stance. And because there's a real person who's really cool, like share some clips of her that you can find online. There's a real person at the center of this question, right? Someone who is close to their age, who's accomplished amazing things. And so this is where argument writing actually feels like something that's worth participating in for them. And some students will argue that Aileen Gu is proof that you can do basically it all, right? All of it. Every you can have your cake and eat it too. And others are gonna argue that specialization is a lot of times what creates greatness, right? We look at Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant. Both of those positions are valid, both require reasoning, and that's exactly what we want from our students. All right, example number five, last one is Katie Lidecki and Tone. So Katie Delette, Katie Ledecki is an athlete who dominated long-distance swimming for a very, very long time. So here's the passage. Katie Ledecki has dominated long-distance swimming for over a decade. Known for her relentless training and quiet confidence, she has broken multiple world records and won several Olympic gold medals. So the prompt that we're gonna give our students is what tone does the author create in this passage? Identify a word or phrase that helps establish that tone. So students are looking at diction, word choice, literary awareness in five minutes. That's it. And I want you to notice the richness of the language in that passage. We use relentless, quiet confidence, dominated, right? Those are great words for students to really dig into. Like, what does quiet confidence even mean? And why did the author choose the term relentless instead of just hardworking? Like, this is where you can have a whole mini conversation if you want to about craft and word choice and how important that is for portraying the author's purpose, right? Okay, so I've walked you through five examples. Those examples will all make sure will be in the show notes for you and will also be in the transcript. So you can just copy and paste it and put it on your board. Um, but I would suggest adding like a little video clip or snippet or something like that that you can find online about each of these incredible women. And I love this routine. It's so effective because I think it goes beyond just being convenient. It works because it's not necessarily additive, right? You're not adding something like a whole research unit on top of your curriculum. You're weaving this into your curriculum. Like those writing skills, theme, main idea, claim, evidence, argument, tone, those are skills that you've probably already taught or maybe currently teaching. And you're changing just the content that students are writing about, right? That's a minimal lift on your part with a significant payoff. And the second reason it works is engagement, right? Students recognize the athletes in the passage. They're not just gonna like gloss over, right? These incredible athletes that we've been seeing in the Olympic, the winter Olympics, or that they recognize from the Summer Olympics in years past, right? They are going to have this automatic hook and get curious because these are real women who competed on real stages under extreme amounts of pressure. And I think that that reality just lands a little bit differently for our students as opposed to maybe studying women from history that don't fall into this category necessarily. That's a generalization and not entirely true all the time. But third, like here we have background knowledge, right? One of the smaller benefits of this is that your students are building knowledge of influential women in sports. Some of your students might not know who Katie Ledecki is. Some of them might know who Eileen Goo is, right? They might have seen some of her interviews all over the internet recently. And I love this because they're not just learning about women, but it's connected to a skill that is gonna be beneficial for them when they get to the state tests. Um what I love too, side note is that you can do this not just with Women's History Month, but you could do this for Black History Month or Hispanic Heritage Month with any athlete, right? This structure is incredibly flexible. Okay, so I hope this episode has given you an idea that you can go take and use in your classroom. One athlete, one short passage, one prompt, five minutes, that's it. An athlete spotlight quick right. Do it on Monday every single week throughout the month of March or however you want to structure it. But if you do try it with your students, please let me know over on Instagram at EV Academics. Or if you are an EB teacher, share in the Facebook group how it went for you. And if you loved this episode and you found it helpful, please share it with a fellow ELA teacher so that they can use this in their classroom too. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining me this week, and I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.