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Month: September 2017

A Busy September

A Busy September

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September has been busy!  I’m sure you’d agree.  After a nice long summer of sleeping in, swimming, travelling, hanging out with friends and family, and doing all those fun summer things, we took the first week of school to get into routines.

During week one we worked on:

  • remembering our locker combinations and using lockers efficiently (7th grade)
  • selecting a good book to read (everyone)
  • remembering what to bring to class each day (book, reading notebook, writing notebook, duo-tang, pencil, agenda)
  • developing good habits and routines (getting to class on time, using the bathroom during breaks as much as possible, taking our books out so we’re ready for class, putting cell-phones away during class)
  • using our agendas properly to record homework

These daily habits and routines may not seem like a big deal, but they are!  They allow us to use our time wisely in class so that we’ll get the most out of our learning this year.  They’re time savers and organizational strategies that we can use this year and in the future to maximize our learning time and focus.

 

During week two and three we:

  • read every day in class (7th and 8th grades)
  • read lots of memoirs to learn about the genre and in preparation for our first writing assignment in 8th grade
  • we’ve also written many quick-writes in 8th grade!  A quick-write is when you do about 7-10 minutes of nonstop writing to explore a topic for a possible future piece
  • worked on sentence fluency and grammar in 8th grade by combining, reorganizing, and imitating sentence structures
  • had our first vocabulary lesson in 8th grade on the prefixes ‘PRO’ and ‘RETRO’ (don’t forget our first Vocabulary test is on Thursday!)
  • read two short stories in 7th grade: “Seventh Grade” by Gary Soto, and “Thank-you Ma’am” by Langston Hughes in order to learn about the elements of narrative fiction 
  • We’re working on identifying character traits and supporting our ideas with evidence from our self-selected novels in 7th grade. In order to help us learn about character in 7th grade we watched this video
  • We reviewed the Reading Response Journal Guide (see below) in both 7th and 8th grade (this is an ongoing review that we’ll do throughout the year). [embeddoc url=”https://rdeighton.edublogs.org/files/2017/09/Reading-Response-Journals-1etcp04-24vxbnk.docx” download=”all” viewer=”microsoft” ]
  • Almost all students have completed and handed in their first reading response journal entry for this year. If you haven’t done so, please do!  Most 7th grade journals have gone home to parents/guardians for signature so that parents can stay informed about their child’s progress and view my comments on the response.
  • In 7th grade, we are also busy reviewing the foundational elements of a SENTENCE – Subject and Predicate!

Next week, amongst other things, we’ll start to design our blogs for this year!

Beginning of Year CHALLENGE!

Beginning of Year CHALLENGE!

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Welcome and welcome back!  Whether you are back in Room 211 for a second year of English Language Arts with me, or if you’re new to my classroom and/or new to the school, I want you to know that I’m excited about starting a brand new year of reading and writing with you!

At the 3-week mark, I think we’re off to a great start. We are READING lots!  Students in both 7th and 8th grade are either well-into their first book, or they’ve already started reading book 2 or 3!  Since we’re already such avid readers, I’d like to challenge ALL of my students to a self-driven CHALLENGE!

 

 

I challenge you to:

  • Think of how many books you’ve read so far this year (is it one? two? 3/4 of a book?). Use that number to identify how much you can read in just about two and a half weeks.
  • Make a reading goal in terms of NUMBER of books for the entire school year and secretly record that number somewhere in your agenda. TELL NO ONE because it’s not about impressing others with big goals, it’s about pushing ourselves to do our very best. No comparisons are needed.
  • Make another reading goal by thinking about which genres you usually read and which genres you should try this year at least once.  Here’s a list of genres for you to consider: realistic fiction, historical fiction, dystopian fiction, humour, sports, science fiction, action/adventure, fantasy, mystery, and NONFICTION: memoir, science, geography, autobiography, humour, history, etc. etc.! Your goal is to read at least one book outside of your preferred genre.

What happens if you don’t meet your goal by the end of the year?

Nothing!

No one but you will know what your goal was, and next year you can adjust your goal to a more reasonable number.  But, if you’ve kept up with your reading homework (20 minutes every day for 7th grade, and 30 minutes every day for 8th grade) I GUARANTEE that you’ll have read way more than you’ve read in past years.  That will be something to celebrate, right?

 

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