The Ultimate Guide to Middle School Essays

Why are middle school essays such a chore? Is there a way to make them more manageable? To teach the planning, organizing, writing and editing in a way that is simpler but more effective? We think so.

Below you’ll find our complete guide to middle school essay writing. The resources mentioned below can be found on TPT.

Want a sneak peak first? Check out the preview below (preview does not include full resource).

Taking Notes for Middle School Essays

Often middle school essays begin with taking notes. There are dozens of quality notetaking methods out there, from Cornell Notes to Sketch Notes and more. We don’t necessarily recommend a single notetaking system, given that some students are linear learners while others are visual, etc. Whatever notetaking method you use in your own room is fine.

What our resources focus on is the fundamentals of notetaking. What does it mean to take notes in the first place?

But aren’t there questions students can ask? Guides that can direct them to the kinds of deeper level noticing that we want them to aspire to.

Indeed there are.

Which is why we have created just such a list.

We recommend modeling notetaking as a whole class. It can often be helpful to assign different types of questions to different students to track. So one student might be responsible for tracking images, another for looking out for foreshadowing, another for pondering why the writer chose a particular title, etc. Then you as the teacher can model how you take notes, what you notice and think, while at the same time getting input from students as you go.

No matter what system of notetaking you use with your students, it is an endeavor that requires lots of practice. But the more you do it together as a class, the more students will start to understand what to look for in the first place.

Image Boards & Quote Boards

So you’ve got a decent set of notes. Now what? How do you use those notes to write a compelling essay?

This is the step that many middle school students get bogged down on. Many either can’t come up with anything at all or just want to dive directly into the writing (which can be fine for the students who are great writers, but is often a disaster for everyone else).

Image Boards and Quote Boards are two methods for mining the notes students have taken and pulling out ideas to build an essay around. And what’s great about both is that they are very visual.

To make either, the first step is for students to review their notes and identify major ideas, concepts or themes that stand out (hopefully something stands out).

For example, a student reading Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart may have noticed that there is a lot of references to eyes and seeing. Poe repeats words related to sight multiple times throughout the story, and the old man’s eye is central to the plot. Jumping off from there, a student could create an Image Board that focuses on this theme.

Or perhaps a student has noticed that Poe never names the narrator of the story. In fact, there are no details about the narrator at all, nothing that reveals the narrator’s identity in any way. A savvy student might then ask: what if the narrator is a woman?

Image Boards do not have to be overly complicated. The purpose is simply to identity major themes and ideas that could be explored in an essay. Image Boards work best when students stick to broader concepts (which, after all, are what essays will likely be crafted around).

A Quote Board is in the same vein. The difference is that instead of looking for images, students will search for quotes from other writers that relate to the theme or idea they want to write about.

For example, Ray Bradbury’s story All Summer in a Day revolves around the idea of memory. In the story, it is Margot’s memory of the sun that separates her from the other students on Venus, who cannot recall the sunshine they experienced when they were little.

Quote Boards and Image Boards can easily be combined by simply requiring students to make an Image Board that includes so many quotes.

Both boards can be easily made in Canva (which offers free versions for students).

Claim Station

Once students have started to get an idea of what they want to write about, it’s time to start crafting claims. A claim is the central argument or idea that students will explore in the essay. It is the essay’s central thesis statement.

There are lots of ways to work with students to create claims for their essays. We like creating a Claim Station: a tag board or area in the classroom where students can write out claim sentences on sticky notes and hang them for everyone to see. We recommend having each student write multiple claims and post them (this encourages students to think about a range of different essays that can be written from the same text).

As students post claims, give them time to review all the different claims that their classmates have come up with. Then tell students that any claim at the station is up for grabs. You don’t have to write about the claim you came up with if a different claim is more compelling.

The purpose of a claim station is for students to see that there are a lot of different ideas out there, and thus a lot of different possible essays. It can also help those students who still feel lost in trying to connect their notes to an actual argument to build an essay around.

Structure Cards

Once students have a solid claim, they can begin structuring their essays. This is another area middle school students often struggle with. Which is why Structure Cards can be particularly helpful.

Structure Cards are color-coded cards for each of the following:

• Claim/Thesis Card
• Opening & Closing Paragraph Cards
• Topic Sentence Cards
• Evidence Cards
• Title Card

Visual Essays

Once students have worked out the structure of their essays, they can now craft Visual Essays. This is the last step before sitting down to pound out the first full draft.

A Visual Essay is another scaffolding piece between brainstorming and writing. It allows students to build from their Structure Cards and fully visualize each section of their essay.

To create a Visual Essay, students must create either a slide or a PNG image (we recommend using Canva) for each paragraph in their essay. For each slide/image, students must take a picture or upload an image of the text they read (you can have students take pictures with their phones and upload them, or do this yourself and supply the images in a shared drive). These pictures are used as the main section of the image/slide.

Students must identify and highlight in the text the evidence they will be citing for each paragraph. This forces students to get very specific and connect the ideas they are writing about to the text they read.

Then students must add the following:

• Their thesis/topic sentence
• An Evidence Sentence that points to the evidence in the text
• A Justification Sentence that explains how the evidence supports the thesis/topic sentence

Visual Essays are also great for peer feedback. They are much easier for students to read and review and provide criticism for. And they provide an excellent space for feedback before students go through the laborious process of writing the entire essay.

Brain Dumping

We work with a lot of visual-spatial students. Many of these students struggle to write at all and especially struggle to write by hand. Their minds are often filled with dozens and dozens of ideas, all of which are vying for attention right this second.

One way to help students put aside all the ideas buzzing inside their heads and focus on the single idea of their essay is to have them do a Brain Dump before they get to work.

A Brain Dump is simply a bullet list. It doesn’t have to be complete sentences (although it can be). Give students five minutes to write down every single idea that they have in their heads right now. Tell them to jot the ideas down quickly and succinctly.

And then, at the end of five minutes, tell students to review their Brain Dump. These are all the ideas that they must now shelve to Think About Later. For some students, it may actually help to cross each idea out to reinforce this concept visually.

Once this is complete, have the Brain Dumps put aside, and students can begin to write.

Sentence Starters

Once students get going on writing a first draft, it can be helpful for them to have access to sentence starters and transitions they can utilize to move their essays forward. In our resource, we include handouts with all the various sentence starters below.

Check out our full resource for middle school essays.

Topic Sentence Starters

A topic sentence is the first sentence of a paragraph or essay. It informs the reader of the subject of the essay or the paragraph.

Conclusion Sentence Starters

A conclusion sentence is a sentence where you make a final point by wrapping up or summarizing what you have been explaining to your reader.

Evidence Sentence Starters

An evidence sentence is a sentence where you support a claim or argument that you have made by providing evidence to your reader.

Transition Sentence Starters: Contrast

When you contrast between two different ideas or pieces of evidence, you may want to use a transition sentence starter that cues your reader.

Transition Sentence Starters: Order

Many times you need to make distinct to your reader the the information you are giving them comes in a specific order.

Reading Your Essay Aloud

Middle schoolers should be encouraged to read their essays aloud to a partner both during the writing process and once their drafts are finished. The ear is almost always a better editor than the eye, and the process of reading aloud often draws a student writer’s attention to problem areas they would have otherwise overlooked.

To make peer review a bit less laborious, we have students find different partners for each paragraph of their essays. This breaks the editing process up and ensures that students hear from a range of different editors.

Paragraph Cut Apart

Another fun (and visual) way to edit essays is to have students cut their paragraphs apart into their component sentences. Then give those cut-apart sentences to a partner and have the partner try and put the paragraph back together in the proper order.

This exercise is useful for both partners. It can reveal structural and transitional problems for the writer, and it is good practice for the partner who is trying to reconstruct the paragraph. Well-written paragraphs have a flow to them. Their ideas progress in a logical order. Identifying and understanding that order is something that requires practice.

In addition to the middle school essay resources mentioned above, our Ultimate Guide also includes another resource we use regularly for bellringers and fun writing exercises: 1,029 Writing Prompts for Middle School.

This massive collection of writing prompts is perfect for short writing assignments but is also a goldmine for ideas for larger essays. It is broken down into 20 different prompt categories:

Interested in just the writing prompts guide? Check it out here.

Many school districts and educators have taken a stand against ChatGPT and other AI programs. We have no problem with that. But we were also curious if ChatGPT could be used effectively in the modern classroom, and we set out to create an in-depth guide on how to use ChatGPT to enhance student writing.

Since ChatGPT is most effective in the planning and organizing of student essays, we have included this resource as well in our Ultimate Guide to Middle School Essays.

Our ChatGPT guide (learn more about it here) examines how AI can be used at every stage of the writing process: idea generation, outlining, writing topic sentences, editing, making citations, etc. But at each stage, our guide focuses on the thinking process that students must engage with if they are to use AI as something other than just a crutch.

The trick is to leverage AI in a way that keeps the critical analysis and thought process squarely with the student. And our guide provides a roadmap for how to do that.