Ideas for Teaching Setting in 6th Grade Language Arts
Setting: How to teach it in quiz, easy ways. If you’ve ever been in my shoes, then you know what it’s like to teach a novel or to spend weeks on an amazing series of short stories at the beginning of the school year and then a month later, your students can’t remember what setting is or why it’s important or what details and inferences can come from it.
Frustrating, right??!!
But you can’t just NOT review things because of how long they took to teach initially.
So this post is not written to teach you how to start out with the concept of teaching setting… (but I do have lessons and activities to help you with this aspect of things if you click here).
This post is written to help you re-teach and review the concept of setting all throughout the year and to remind you of its importance. It’s also written to help provide you with short, quick, easy ways to spiral back to content-rich passages that will reinforce all sorts of skills. Use them anytime, anywhere!
It’s really important to keep teaching setting throughout the year because the setting helps kids understand the following:
-
how conflicts develop
-
how characters change over time
-
living conditions
-
passage of time
-
author’s purpose
Sometimes we encounter challenges when it comes to teaching setting because much of what is discovered is discovered through the ability to make inferences.
Making logical inferences about anything seems to be the most difficult part of what we do as English / Language Arts & Reading teachers.
But not necessarily…
Check this out—
Easy little mini-passage Clue from the passage Time period Make an inference
Easy little mini-passage Clue from the passage Time period Make an inference
Easy little mini-passage Clue from the passage Time period Make an inference
As you can see, these quick little reading passages are jam-packed with so many reasons to spend some time teaching setting.
It’s something your students have to be exposed to all year, consistently, and in a “spiraled” fashion so they don’t forget the skill.
For quick little exit tickets, bell ringers, sponge activities, or other five-minute fillers, feel free to print this page and just cut apart the little passages and questions above. You could use one each day!
And like I mentioned a second ago, sign up here to get a full month of lesson plans that contain help with setting in the short story section along with other ways to teach inferencing skills embedded throughout all the activities.
