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Page Last Updated May 22, 2012
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AIG READING/LANGUAGE ARTS A SOME WORTHWHILE SUMMER READING ACTIVITIES: First, the Rowan Salisbury School District is sponsoring its FIRST Annual Summer Reading Challenge for all students in grades K-12 beginning the week of June 11, 2012. It's Easy! The student has only to just READ books, newspapers, magazines, on line articles or just about anything! To participate, go on line at http://www.rss.k12.nc.us/index.php/ReadAnything and click Submit Entry on the left side of the page and fill in the form. Be sure to click Submit when you finish. For every entry submitted, the student's name will be entered for a grand prize drawing at the end of the summer for grades K-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The Read Anything Lately website can be visited for updates and entry spotlights. The challenge will conclude with an end-of-summer party on Thursday, August 30, 2012 for all participants! Next, Rowan Public Library is sponsoring TEEN SUMMER READING to include Hunger Games Contests (design, video, writing and more!). Contact your nearest branch for details. 6th Graders are finishing up their vocabulary units and will work in Patterns of Change as we go forth to end this school year. 7th Graders are completing their vocabulary units and are discussing writings from the work Rising Voices in the William and Mary Unit 8th Graders have begun their research paper. In addition to teacher modeling the process in class, students have been given several handouts to help them be successful and asked to make their parents aware of this assignment by sharing the information with their parents. *************** ALL AIG/ELA CLASSES: *In addition to reading assigned novels and related activities, we continue 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. *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. *************** 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. **************************** At 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; and Hiroshima 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 Finn by 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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