Say goodbye to that rolling cart of composition notebooks you don't even take out of your car when you get home and simplify your teacher workload with digital notebooks. Making the shift to digital can simplify your workflow and allow for more opportunities to differentiate how students show their learning.

This engaging series of digital lessons will increase student engagement and learning through timely feedback, peer review, and portfolio reflections. The focus of the lessons is on writing a response to literature essay. Writing to text-based prompts is an important skill that students are asked to do in all subject areas and grade levels.

There are four lessons in this five-day series on writing a response to literature essay- sometimes referred to as a constructed response with text evidence. Each lesson follows the format listed below and is explained in detail in the teaching guide that includes standards and objectives for each lesson.

• Introduce the skill
• Analyze examples and revisions of sample paragraphs
• Practice the skill using an anchor text (Disney Pixar's four-minute animated short film Boundin' is needed as an anchor text for this lesson)
• Lesson review
• Apply the skill to a text and prompt that you assign using customizable slide templates

In lesson one, students will analyze a prompt and identify what they are being asked to write about before writing a topic sentence (or thesis) that includes keywords from the prompt in their response.

In lesson two, students will include all important plot details and a title and author’s name when summarizing a text, without personal opinions.

In lesson three, students will develop their thesis using quotations, or other examples from the text, to support their analysis.

In lesson four, students will write a conclusion paragraph that restates a paraphrased version of their topic sentence (or thesis) and offers additional personal reflections, insights, or evaluations on the topic.

There is an optional day of revising sample essays before students spend the final day of this series of lessons writing their essays.

What else is included?

• A list of 12 editable response to literature writing prompts
• 4 premade Google Jamboards for facilitating peer feedback
• Guiding questions and sentence frames for giving peer feedback
• Detailed instructions on different options for grading essays that include self-reflection and portfolio reflection
• Editable, single-point grading rubrics for each lesson
• Editable slides templates for writing portfolio assignments

The digital notebook slides work well with the Pear Deck or Nearpod extension for whole-class, interactive, direct instruction.