research essay middle school

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by Michelle Boyd Waters, M.Ed.

A Plethora Of Writing Examples For Middle School (& High School)

October 14, 2014 in Pedagogy

When I started my first job as a professional newspaper reporter (This job also served as an internship during my junior year in college — I just didn’t leave for about 6 years.), I quickly realized that all my experience, and all my years of journalism education had not been enough to help me write stories about drug busts, fatal car accidents and tornadoes. All the theoretical work I’d done, and all of the nifty little scholastic and collegiate stories I had done, did not prepare me for real world writing.

At that point, I had to find a solution quickly. After all, I had a deadline to meet, and it was only a few hours away.

One of my colleagues, who also served as a mentor, had the solution. She introduced me to the newspaper’s “morgue.” This was a room filled with filing cabinets in which we kept old — dead — stories arranged by reporter. Whenever I wasn’t’ sure how to write a story, all I had to do was check the morgue for similar stories. If I needed to write a story about a local drug bust, for example, I’d find another story on a similar incident, study its structure, and mentally create a formula in which to plugin the information I’d gathered.

Once I’d gained more experience, and had internalized the formula for that particular type of story, I felt free to branch out as the situation — and my training — warranted.

I do the same thing when I want to write a type of letter, brochure, or report that I’ve never written before.

This is what writing looks like in the real world.

Of course, if you’re a new teacher like me, there is one problem with providing mentor texts to my students: I have a dearth of middle school level writing sitting around in my file cabinets.

Fortunately, the Internet is full of sources, so I scoured the bowels of Google to find examples. I know how busy you are, so I’m sharing.

Expository writing examples for middle school

Below are several sources of expository writing samples for middle school students.

The Write Source Expository Writing Samples
Holt, Rinehart, Winston Expository Essay Models

Finally, here is an article in the New York Times that will help you teach your students real-world expository writing skills .

Descriptive writing examples for middle school

Descriptive Writing Samples from Novels
Milwaukee Public Schools Descriptive Essay Samples (p. 137)
Holt, Rinehart, Winston Descriptive Essay Models

Narrative writing examples for middle school

Writing Samples by Steve Peha (PDF)
The Write Source Narrative Writing Samples
Oregon Department of Education Scored Writing Samples (Ideas and Organization)
Oregon Department of Education Scored Writing Samples (Sentence Fluency and Conventions)
Oregon Department of Education Scored Writing Samples (Voice and Word Choice)
Oregon Department of Education High School Scored Narrative and Argumentative Writing Samples
Holt, Rinehart, Winston Narrative Essay Models

Argumentative/persuasive writing examples for middle school

The Write Source Persuasive Writing Samples
Holt, Rinehart, Winston Persuasive Essay Models

Reflective writing examples for middle school

Reflective essay examples from Lake Washington Girls Middle School

If you know of any other online writing example sources, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Related topics: Argumentative Writing , Informative Writing , Mentor Texts , Narrative Writing

About the author

Michelle Boyd Waters, M.Ed.

I am a secondary English Language Arts teacher, a University of Oklahoma student working on my doctorate in Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum with an concentration in English Education and co-Editor of the Oklahoma English Journal. I am constantly seeking ways to amplify students' voices and choices.

This is very, very helpful. Thank you for sharing!

As a new middle school teacher (coming from elementary) this was very helpful and encouraging.

Thank you very much for letting me know. I’m glad that I was able to help you!

Thank you! I’m glad I can help.

Your welcome

This is super helpful. Thank you!

These links are a fantastic help. Thank you!

This helped me BUNCHES! Thanks so much!

thanks so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! XD

These links are now dead 🙁

Thank you for notifying me! I have updated the post to include new (live!) links. Some of them are geared towards high school, but I think we can still use them as exemplars of what we want our students to aim for.

Comments are closed.

Jan 6, 2020

Non-fiction in Middle School ELA: Using Research, Essay Writing, and Book Creation for Skill Focus

Updated: Dec 29, 2021

As with most reading workshop units, my non-fiction unit is based all around REAL books chosen by students. With non-fiction, this can be tricky to navigate. Over the years, I've used Lucy Calkins units to guide my non-fiction instruction. As is with most of her work, it is not very straightforward and sometimes a bit too open-ended for my students. So, I've morphed her ideas and came up with my own major approach to teaching non-fiction reading and writing.

What Skills Should be Taught

The first thing every teacher should do is determine what skills they want to teach . Obviously, we all have standards to follow, but a lot of standards overlap.

For non-fiction, these are the major skills that should be taught in middle school:

Main idea and supporting details- Specifically crafting main idea statements and using these statements to make summaries.

Text structure - Identifying and writing using text structure.

Text features - Beyond identifying...determining their purpose and also creation of text features. This will help.

Author's purpose and opinion - What motivated the author to write this? What is his/her point-of-view of the topic?

Synthesizing - Using various sources about one topic and analyzing commonalities and differences.

Research - Finding and using appropriate research to prove a claim.

These should NOT be taught in isolation. Students should be reading authentic texts to learn these skills.

Step #1 : Research

Depending on your grade level, research may look differently compared to others. I teach 6th, so I have my classes first choose a topic they'd like to research . I give them about 10 choices using a Google Form. From there, I group students based on common choices. This is for a group activity later on and allows students to meet and talk about their research.

After their topics are chosen, they request books from the public library on their topics . I give them very specific guidelines for book choice (less than 100 pages, juvenile or young adult non-fiction, expository not biography). I give them plenty of time to pick up their book(s) before beginning our unit. ( See my post about this ).

Then, they start their research in their books. Each day, I focus on a different skill from above and they need to use those non-fiction skills to guide their research. In my mini-lesson, I show how I use the skill with a mentor text. The pictures here show a sample student's digital notebook. These are a few pages.

Once they've done about a week or so of research in their texts, I provide them with articles on their topics. You may opt to have them find the articles themselves; I chose not to with my 6th graders because they get into that more in upper middle. For the articles, they focus on main idea statements and summarizing with lots of prompts.

They wrap up their research with provided videos on their topic, using main idea statements without prompts.

The very last component of their research is to see what topics all the sources have in common. What do all of them say about the topic? What are some major sub-topics they all touch upon?

This whole process takes about 2 and half weeks.

Step #2 : Essay Writing

All of their research leads to this a research essay . Students are not just writing an essay about their topic...it is not an all about [topic]. This essay centers on an opinion on their topics . The students start with claim about their topic. I say to them, "you've just read and researched [topic]. What do you have to say about it?". This becomes their claim. It is not a fact, it is an opinion that can be proved with evidence from their research.

From there, students work on pulling research from their research notebooks that could support their thinking. So, they already have a lot of research... what do they have already that could support their claim?

Developing topic sentences for body paragraphs is next on the to-do list. The topic sentence is the core of the body paragraph. It sets the stage for what the paragraph is about. Students are provided with sentence frames to build their sentences. For this particular essay, each topic sentence focuses on a different source. Students are encouraged to include their claim and focus of the source within their topic sentence. Once they finish, I check the sentences before they can move on to the next step.

After approval, students transfer topic sentences over to a new slide and start gathering the final evidence they want to add to their essays . They find three pieces of text evidence to support their topic sentences, especially the claim. These details can be from research they gathered already, however, they do need to be quoting , so my students often have to go back into their sources for quotes. Throughout the research process, they are supposed to be tagging page numbers, so they should easily be able to grab a quote when going back to the research notebooks.

Once all evidence is gathered, students must explain their text evidence. This is super important in middle school and may be a shift from elementary. They must explain how the evidence they chose supports their claim. They do this by using digital sticky notes over each piece of evidence.

Students then spend time looking over my sample essay . Yes, I write an essay, too ( see my blog post about that ). It's a lot of work, but once it's done, it's done. I give them a key of highlights to focus on. They read through my essay with a partner and highlight specific aspects of the paragraphs. This helps them see how their essay is supposed to be written. From there, they start drafting their own body paragraphs with a given checklist.

I have them write their body paragraphs first , then I talk about their introductions and conclusions. In the past, I used to teach elaborate intros and conclusions. I've learned, though, that the less wordy these are the better. So I teach them a basic three-sentence format for them. When it comes to state testing, especially, those who grade the essays just want to get to the nitty-gritty. The first picture here are the colors I tell them to focus on in their body paragraphs. The other picture is how I tell them to set up their intros and conclusions.

This whole process takes about a week. I conference with students the entire time. We spend a bit of time on revision, mostly focusing on how to not be repetitive with their writing of claims.

I have another blog post that explains this in more detail!

Step #3 : Digital eBook

All of this research and essay writing culminate in a group project . Students work in groups based on common topics. The ultimate goal is to create an informational book on Google Slides that looks like an expository text one would find in book stores! Students must create text features, headings, chapters, table of contents, and more.

They first spend time determining what topics they want to focus on in their books. They discuss common research they found. Once students come up with a decent list of topics, they put the topics under text structure categories with the goal of using that text structure when explaining the topic. I also have the students change the topics into chapter titles.

After they get all of the above organized, chapters are determined and students start gathering evidence that could fit into certain categories (mini-stories, quotes, statistics, etc.) with the intention of using the information in that chapter and to avoid just listing facts.

Then it's time to create ! They go into Google Slides and we discuss some of the tech tools they can use to create their books. Students set up chapters, create diagrams and charts, add pictures, color, etc. and overall set it up like an expository informational text. These come out great and I always share them with the school and parents.

Bottom Line

This is a huge undertaking, but it so much more authentic to build a unit around non-fiction and research with one specific topic so students can hone skills. Going digital with this makes organization so much easier. The whole process takes about a month and a half in my 82 minute classes (factoring in our daily reading and grammar/vocabulary.)

Interested in this unit ? Click below!