Guys, I birthed a MASSIVE baby last spring:

E2E Story Shorts: FULL YEAR Bell Work for Inference Reading and Writing Practice

Wait! Don’t leave! I swear I’m not just selling you my stuff! But, you may want to buy it after I tell you what I made.

I’m currently teaching ELA1 and ELA3 at the high school level, and DAMN these kids are LITERAL. Like, I could leave them a trail of breadcrumbs and they’d eat the bread off the floor and still not find their way home. Not exaggerating. They can’t make an inference to save their lives. If the ending of a story isn’t spelled out for them, they have no idea what happened. Something had to be done, so I spent ALLLLL last year creating a yearlong bell work program that teaches reading, making inferences, and writing paragraphs that cite and explain text evidence. I had to write stories myself so I could be sure the kids would enjoy them. I didn’t shy away from the poop jokes; I did what I had to do, and it has worked!

I can truly and honestly say my students like doing this, engage in it, and are improving their writing. Even on the most dumpter-fire-y of days, nearly all of them are willing to tackle this task.

In my opinion, this is the best teaching tool I have created to date because the kids like it AND it works.

You can see a sample of what I’m talking about on my TpT store’s product preview. The preview is a big one; it includes 18 Story Shorts (Q4 materials) that you can try out with your own kids. You can also check out stories by listening to them on the E2E YouTube channel.

Keywords: secondary, ELA, bell work, writing practice, reading practice, full year lessons, printable, inferences, engraged2engaged, text evidence, citing