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Page Last Updated Jan 04, 2012
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AIG READING/LANGUAGE ARTS WAY TO GO! Kyla Jackson will be representing Knox Middle School in the District's Spelling Bee. Kyla is a 6th Grade AIG/ELA student. ALL CLASSES: *In addition to reading assigned novels and related activities, we have begun to revisit areas where most of them are showing a need for review based on data gleaned from the recent District Reading Assessment. Note taking, modeling and more practice are among the strategies that will be used to review. *Because of computer lab scheduling, students will have until January 11th to drop their New Powerful Words Projects into my Drop Box. *The RSS District has initiated a system wide vocabulary unit (Words at Work) of prefixes and suffixes and selected words for all middle school grades. Although the AIG/ELA William and Mary Units include analysis of words (i.e., origin, word families, parts of speech, prefixes, suffixes, and roots) related to the reading selections, Words at Work--with a primary focus on prefixes and suffixes and specific vocabulary words--will be added. ******************************* 6th Graders They are still reading The Lost Garden and will be making Bloom's Balls as a strategy to help enhance their thinking skills and ability to answer higher order questions. This class really enjoys hands-on activities, so I try to incorporate as much of it that I can. 7th Graders will begin reading The Member of the Wedding, a play by Carson McCullers. Students will be assigned parts to read aloud in class. 8th Graders The students have been issued The Giver. They will discuss and answer questions and complete vocabulary words. As usual, they are required to write summaries in their writing journals on a regular basis. *************** Reading Enrichment: The students in this class are enrolled for two nine-weeks during Exploratory; consequently, two different groups of students are served over the course of a year. They attend every other day, two or three times a week depending on the A Day - B Day cycle. The students read and discuss EOG type selections and with questions. Although most of the reading is done aloud in class by both the teacher and the students, some reading is assigned for homework. There are lot of hand on activities and graphic organizers used to enhance learning, but the UNRAAVEL strategy is used extensively. **************************** AIG READING/LANGUAGE ARTS for 2011-2012At each grade level, students will be engaged in special language arts units from the Center of Gifted Education: The College of William and Mary. The 6th grade units are Autobiographies and Patterns of Change; 7th grade units are Persuasion and The 1940's: A Decade of Change; and 8th grade units are Utopia and Threads of Change in 19th Century American Literature. The units are designed especially to meet the needs of high ability students. The goals are as follows: * to develop analytical and interpretive skills in literature * to develop persuasive writing skills * to develop linguistic competency * to develop listening/oral communication skills * to develop reasoning skills in the language arts * to understand the concept of change in the language arts In the 6th grade, students will read the following novels: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle; Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson; A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck; The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis; Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli; My Daniel by Pam Conrad; The Girl From Yamhill by Beverly Cleary; Childtimes by Eloise Greenfield; How I Came to be a Writer by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, A Day of Pleasure by Issac Bashevis Singer; and The Invisible Thread by Yoshiko Uchida; In the 7th grade, students will read the following novels: Journey to Topaz by Yoshiko Uchida; Taking Sides by Gary Soto; Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor; Rising Voices: Writings of Young Native Americans by Arlene B. Hirschfelder and Berverly R. Singer; Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank; The Journey by Shelia Hamanaka; Maus II by Art Spiegelman; andHiroshima by John Hersey. In the 8th grade, students will read the following novels: Lord of the Flies by William Golding; Animal Farm by George Orwell; The Giver by Lois Lowry; Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville; and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnby Mark Twain. The play A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare will also be read. In addition to the novels, high quality poems, short stories, speeches and essays will be included. Students will be asked to write responses that will be referred to during class discussions. Students will also respond to writing prompts to clarify their thinking, analyze ideas, increase vocabulary, improve structure, and/or to record their ideas about works read. All classes will participate in debates. In addition, the 7th grade will complete an independent grammar packet. All grades will be required to keep a Reading and Writing Log. All students have received the log instructions, but they will not have to start keeping the logs until I am sure they understand all of the required components. The goal is to have them prepared to begin this task within the next couple of weeks.
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