This teaching resource for RI.8.2 Determining Central Idea and Summary for Informative Writing Paragraph Response breaks down the standard and provides graphic organizers, paragraph frames, sentence starters, and rubrics in both digital and printable worksheets.

Middle school students struggle with writing complete and coherent constructive responses to informative texts. The analysis portion is often a repeat or paraphrase of the cited text, instead of an explanation of it.

Learning to write response paragraphs is difficult and takes time to learn and teach. The RACE strategy doesn’t really teach students how to analyze.This resource will help students to determine a central idea of a text & analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas, and provide an objective summary of the text.

Available in both Printable and Digital activities, this resource includes: 

• Poster for reading informational skill
• Lesson plan for how to implement this resource
• Learning scale/rubric
• Reading informational text vocabulary activity and notes with KEY
• Graphic organizer that analyzes the informational text with this standard
• Paragraph Frame for the writing about informational text for this standard
• Sentence Stems for written responses for this standard

Inside the printable PDF, you’ll find the Google SlidesTM compatible link to Google file of worksheets.

This resource can be used again and again with various informational texts. There are NO text passages in this resource.

This is a standards-based approach. Students learn what is expected of this standard through multiple practice opportunities with the common core standard:  RI.8.2 Determining Central Idea and Summary.

This resource helps you scaffold your students with classroom-proven strategies through the process of writing informational response paragraphs that can be later grouped together into essays.

NO READING TEXTS ARE INCLUDED IN THIS RESOURCE - this is a resource that helps students to analyze and write. However, this resource can be used with ANY informational texts.

Directions for use:

1. Read ANY selected informational texts

2. Hang the standards poster, introduce the rubric and academic vocabulary.

3. Students fill out the graphic organizer referring to the informational texts they’ve read.

4. Depending on their level of writing skills, students can either use the paragraph frames or the sentence stems as needed for scaffolded support.

4. Conference with students about their progress as they continue to practice writing for this standard.

5. Repeat with other texts until students master this standard and only use the graphic organizer to gather information before writing independently without the added scaffolds.

Any questions/concerns?

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Also available in the Writing for Common Core Series for 8th grade:

Cite text evidence writing paragraphs RL.8.1

Theme & Summary Writing Paragraphs for RL.8.2

Fictional Elements RL.8.3 Writing Literary Analysis Paragraphs

Word Meaning & Tone RL.8.4 Writing Paragraphs

Compare Text Structures RL.8.5 Writing Analysis Paragraphs

Points of View & Style RL.8.6 Writing Literary Analysis

Comparing Multimedia & Text RL8.7 Writing Analysis

Compare Folklore & Modern Fiction Writing Paragraphs RL.8.9

Reading Standards Tracker & Reflection Paragraphs RL8.10

BUNDLE of All Reading Literature RL.8.1-10 Writing Response Paragraphs

This is also available in a MEGA BUNDLE for both Reading Literature and Information