The first month of school has flown by!  It’s hard to believe that we’re already in October, but when I recap below what we’ve been up to lately, I’m sure you’ll agree that we’ve been pretty busy this September.

Firstly, we’re all here!  Everyone has a blog, and I can’t wait to read all the great things that you’ll write this year.  Students are always welcome to read and comment on one another’s blogs.  Please check out the Blogging and Commenting Guidelines to make sure that your comments follow the guidelines.  In a nutshell, the guidelines suggest that you:

• be kind
• remember to use punctuation and real writing (no text talk please)
• be positive when commenting on the writing your peers are doing because writing is hard and we all need encouragement more than criticism
• respect your own and others privacy by not using first and last names and not leaving tracks (no personal information about where you’ll be and when you’ll be there)

Parents are also always welcome to comment on our blogs!  We’d love to have your voices here to encourage us to keep reading and writing, thinking and creating!

Secondly, I want to congratulate EVERYONE for doing so well in getting into the reading habit.  So many of you have already finished your first book for this school year, and you’re well into the second one!  Congratulations!  At this rate, you’re sure to read at least 10 books this year, and that is definitely something to celebrate.

 

7th Grade News!

In 7th grade, we’ve been working on a ‘close reading’ of the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon.  Close reading involves:

• reading the piece through once to just get a ‘sense’ of it
• rereading, part by part, at a slower rate to take the time to really think about what the author is saying
• use a pencil (in this case a piece of chalk) to jot down ideas as you reread
• making inferences, asking questions, making connections and judgements about what we’ve read and annotating the text (taking notes on it)
• putting it all together to get a good idea of the main message that the author is trying to convey

Today, we finished our close reading and we started working on writing our own “Where I’m From” poems.  Our writing process so far looked a little like this:

1. We made lists of the various categories of memories that the author included, such as parents, siblings, pastimes, things people tell us, hobbies, foods that we share with the people we love, etc. etc.
2. We added a few categories of our own, like ‘sports’ and ‘friends’.
3. Then we started writing by taking one idea and really trying to use descriptive language, sights, smells, sounds, and feelings to describe the idea.
4. For example, when we looked at the category of ‘chores,’ instead of saying, “I’m from doing the dishes,” we said things like, “I’m from the clean smell of sudsy Dawn, the hot water, and seeing my reflection in each plate”

Yup!  We’re getting creative, and I can’t wait to read all of the poems when they’re done!  I hope everyone posts them on their blogs so that we can enjoy them, learn more about each other, and learn more about writing from one another!

 

8th Grade News!

In 8th grade, we’re reading Memoir in preparation for writing our own memoirs.  What is memoir?  Memoir is nonfiction narrative, true stories about moments in our lives that we will never forget because they taught us something about life, about ourselves, about the world.

Here we are reading lots of student memoirs and memoirs by accomplished authors.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By mid-week, we hope to all have decided on a topic for our memoirs.  We’ve done a few ‘quick-writes’ to help us decide which memories mean the most to us and have the greatest potential for being rich and interesting memoirs.  Once we have our topics, we’ll get busy drafting our memoirs.

Well, it’s no wonder September has flown by!  We’ve been working hard.  I’m proud of all of you, and look forward to a jam-packed October.