ELA in a Long Block: A Plan for Alaska Teachers

Quick answer: Treat the long block as three moves rather than one long lesson: a short shared text everyone meets together, a working stretch pitched at two or three depths, and a closing task you collect. Alaska teachers have extra reason to write that structure down, because four-day calendars and travel days mean a single lost period costs more here than it does in most states.

How do you structure a 90-minute ELA block without losing the room?

Ninety minutes is three moves, not one. Open with a text short enough to read aloud in about ten minutes so every student meets the same material before anyone works alone. Hand over forty minutes of working time with two or three depths of task written on the sheet. Close with fifteen minutes of writing you collect.

Itinerant teaching makes that middle stretch the hard part. When you are in a building two days a week, that stretch has to run without you hovering: a printed instruction sheet, one worked example, an obvious stopping point. Structured prompt sets carry that load well: Grade 3 Creative Writing – Structured Prompts & Story Starters gives younger writers an opening line and a shape to fill, so forty minutes does not stall on a blank page.

What order should the first two weeks of the unit follow?

Put the skill before the product. Week one teaches one move - how a writer builds a character, how a source frames an argument - practiced on short passages you can finish inside a single block. By the second week they apply that same move to a longer text and end in a piece you grade. Reversing that order produces assignments nobody can do yet.

Build in a catch-up lane from day one. Weather, travel and subsistence obligations move students in and out, and a unit assuming perfect attendance breaks by the second week. Keep every task on one page, number the pages, and let a returning student pick up at the number rather than reconstructing four days of discussion from a classmate.

How do you keep distance and correspondence students on the same unit?

Alaska's roadless communities mean a large share of students work through distance or correspondence programs, and many teachers cover more than one site. A unit survives that only if it travels as a self-contained packet: instructions on the page, no reliance on yesterday's board work, and a version that prints when bandwidth fails. The units on Alaska Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12) are built as downloads for exactly that reason.

Step-by-step analysis units are the safest bet for students working at a distance. Analysing Cartoons – Step by Step walks a reader through a single image one question at a time, which means a high-school student in a village school without a teacher in the room can still produce a defensible piece of analysis. Numbered steps do the scaffolding that a live discussion would otherwise have to carry.

How do you get graded evidence out of a long block?

Decide before the unit starts which two tasks go in the gradebook and which are practice. The Alaska Content and Performance Standards describe skills, not worksheets, so your evidence needs to show a student doing the skill more than once. One short constructed response mid-unit and one longer piece at the end is usually enough for a report card conversation.

Keep the Performance Evaluation for Alaska's Schools in its place: a calendar event, not a curriculum. PEAKS runs in ELA and math across grades three through nine, and the useful preparation is ordinary close reading and writing to a prompt. If you want a full year already sequenced, English Language Arts Complete – Ready-to-Use Curriculum for Middle School ELA covers middle-school ELA end to end, and State Standards Navigator: Teaching Resources by State lets you compare how other states label the same skills.

Frequently asked questions

Are these resources affiliated with DEED or the PEAKS program?

No. They are independent teaching materials, not affiliated with, approved by or endorsed by the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development, any exam authority or any other education agency. You decide how a unit maps onto the standards your district uses.

Do the units work on a four-day calendar?

Yes, with one adjustment. Each lesson is a discrete task with its own instructions, so you can merge two into a single long block or drop a practice task without breaking the sequence. Number the tasks in teaching order and a student who misses a day rejoins at the number.

What if a unit turns out not to suit my class?

Check the preview images and the grade band on the product page before buying, since these are instant downloads rather than physical goods. If something still goes wrong, see the store's refund policy. Editable elements often let you retarget a unit rather than replace it.

Related reading

• Mapping ELA Units to the Content and Performance Standards in Alaska
• Alaska ELA: Teaching in the Weeks Around PEAKS
• Alaska Teaching Resources & Worksheets (Grades K–12)