Genesis: Students finished their writing workshop portfolios this week.  Their work on this project was tremendous, and students frequently expressed their observations of how exactly they have grown as writers, which was meaningful to see.  We mapped out this 6th grade year and interpreted these key narrative events in drama groups.  We began reading a play, The House of Dies Drear, adapted from the novel by Virginia Hamilton.

Legacy: This week was filled with end-of-year activities.  We held our final “Rekkas Class” on Tuesday, where students wrote a letter to their future selves (to be mailed by me in four years).

Explorers: This week was filled with end-of-year activities.  We held our final “Rekkas Class” on Tuesday, where students wrote a letter to their future selves (to be mailed by me in four years) and visually mapped out this year of 8th grade.

Legacy: Students watched and responded to The Day the Earth Stood Still, and also reviewed class graduation speeches.  Next week we will have our special goodbye G/E class.

Explorers: Students worked with the House Theater to develop dramatizations of their science fiction plot concepts.  Next week we will have our special goodbye G/E class.

Genesis: After book chats, students chose their science fiction literature circle books and began reading them during workshop.  We held our first literature circle meeting.  We focused on four-line grammar analysis skills, and students practiced identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions in sentences.  Students continued developing their choice writing portfolios in writing workshop.

Legacy: Students developed and completed their final Fahrenheit 451 assessment.  This “learning agenda” helped students reflect on the nature of dystopia in the novel while practicing text analysis skills.  All students created incredible extensions to the book!

Explorers: Students worked on their science fiction story development using plot line elements.  They pitched their work to their fellow classmates for next week’s House Theatre work.

Legacy: Students developed RAFTs informed by their reading of Fahrenheit 451.  A RAFT is a curriculum strategy that relates Role, Audience, Format, and Topic.  This differentiated approach allow students to exercise creativity within a critical response to a text.  Students’ RAFTs are going well!  They are due Monday 5/18.  We also kept up on our current events with a reading of the article “Don’t!” from this week’s New Yorker.  The article linked self-control capability with future academic/life success–ask your student about it!  Students designed their own experiments to continue the studies’ research during X Block.

Explorers: Students developed their graduation speeches during writing workshop time.  These speeches explored a theme that could communicate an audience “call to action”; students worked to integrate famous quotations with their recollection of personal experiences.  Students also read and discussed selected science fiction stories and in preparation for a collaborative project next week.

The Twelve Ingredients of Literature Circles

1) Children choose their own reading material.
2) Small, temporary groups are formed, based on book choice.
3) Different groups read different books.
4) Groups meet on a regular, predictable schedule.
5) Kids use written or drawn notes to guide both their reading and discussion.
6) Discussion topics come from the students.
7) Group meetings aim to be open, natural discussions.
8 ) In newly forming groups, students play a rotating assortment of task roles.
9) The teacher serves as a facilitator.
10) Evaluation is by teacher observation and student self-evaluation.
11) A spirit of playfulness and fun pervades the room.
12) New groups form around new reading choices.

We will continue Civil War Literature Circles next week.

Legacy: We began our study of the science fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 this week with various SMART Board activities to engage prior knowledge before reading.  After an inquiry into definitions of censorship and Ray Bradbury’s essay, “Coda,” we honed a Key Words reading strategy using tough texts by Thomas More (Utopia), George Orwell (1984) as well as an article on McCarthyism.  Discussions of the novel begin next week.

Explorers: Students had additional workshop time this week to develop their social studies papers.  They put incredible effort into their work on this project!  We then began our inquiry into graduation speeches, first considering common themes of the literature and then investigating specific approaches used by commencement speech authors.  Students will begin topic generating and drafting next week.  More information can be found in this week’s Field Notes.

Genesis: This week, we practiced our written Idea Cluster (Idea-Evidence-Interpretation) skills through our memoir study, and we compared/contrasted events from the book with the subjects of McCarthyism, the modern Chinese justice system, and the Hitler Youth through differentiated readings/jigsaw discussions.  We discussed the responses that we would give the author of Red Scarf Girl and continued our independent reading and conferences.  In writing workshop, students continued their narrative drafting and revising.  I led a minilesson on thoughts/feelings in narrative writing/(skill: focused notetaking) using James Howe’s “Everything Will Be Okay.”

Legacy: We practiced our comma rules during reading/writing workshop.  Gifted/enrichment students were tested for NWEA Reading and Language Usage.  To begin our lessons on the drama genre, we read Lorraine Hansberry’s own words on being young, gifted, and black (various topics that provided the foundation for her writing), and performed a cold reading of a scene from her play, “A Raisin In the Sun.”

Explorers: Please see this week’s newsletter for more on the phenomenal presentations of Greek Mythology projects.  Gifted/enrichment students were tested for NWEA Reading and Language Usage.  Students will be drafting their Middle East persuasive essays in language arts next week.

Legacy: We held a fiction writer roundtable to provide meaningful group feedback on our current independent writing drafts.  We focused on letter-essay development and reader response this week.  Our grammar study centered on identifying participles and manipulating them through informal sentence branching.

Explorers: We continued reading and interpreting Greek myths with our partners.  Please see this week’s team newsletter for more information.

Legacy: In writing, we introduced and practiced grammar, appositive phrases, and comma rules.  Minilesson mentor text this week was by Abraham Lincoln (”Emancipation of the Mind”).  Students continued daily independent reading and writing.

Explorers: See this week’s Field Notes for a description of our activities!

Legacy: In writing workshop, we considered how an awareness of social contexts impacts different genres’ writers with excerpts from a poet, science fiction writer, and Pulitzer-winning novelist.  We also developed the different strategies used in planning sheets for writing projects–clustering, bulleting, listing, tracking ideas, and others.  In reading workshop, we continued guided reading practice for social context with an excerpt from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.  Throughout the week, we continued independent reading/writing and conferences.  We also read and interpreted a science fiction excerpt by Philip K. Dick which referenced James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake–we had lots of fun reading through some of the “referential” nonsense-language from that text!  Using a deck of “found” words generated by the class, we continued the “bouts-rimes” tradition with language improvisations that included poetry, songwriting, and fiction.

Explorers: Our writing workshop week centered on creative and critical drafting inspired by Fahrenheit 451.  Students developed their own points of view in their writing in order to improve their “6 Trait” skills as writers.  They also reflected on their work using the rubric as a guide before turning in their collection of drafts.  Instruction has been differentiated by individual writing conferences with students on their drafts.  Example topics from this week’s conferences include revising thesis statements, clustering ideas, elaboration strategies, topic and concluding sentences, integrating interpretation before/after text quotation, MLA quotation format, editing for concise prose, colon/semicolon rules, transitions, matching pronouns with antecedents, the comma rule following dependent clauses, and others.  Using a deck of “found” words generated by the class, we continued the “bouts-rimes” tradition with language improvisations that included poetry, songwriting, and fiction.

Genesis X:  We read A Light in the Forest during X Block time and will hold our discussions on the novel next week using our Literature Web thinking framework.

Legacy: We began the choice-motivated reading and writing workshop study that will span the remainder of Trimester 3.  Students reflected on what kind of writers they are, and we discussed how writers integrate nonfiction readings of human interest with form, genre, and style.  Students found their own human interest current events articles that will inform future writing projects.  In reading workshop, we considered how social context impacts the reading of texts–oftentimes, students want to read literature with a contemporary lens, which leads to misinterpretation.  Through a close study of the first two chapters of Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, I modeled strategies readers use to investigate how their social contexts intersect with the social contexts of various literature selections.  We also investigated writing progress stages through a minilesson on the drafts of “One Art,” a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop.  We noticed how her work evolved from free verse “scraps” into a polished, coherent final.  Students worked on their own independent reading and writing during workshop time.

Explorers: Our writing workshop week centered on creative and critical drafting inspired by Fahrenheit 451.  Students are developing their own points of view in their writing in order to improve their “6 Trait” skills as writers.  Instruction has been differentiated by individual writing conferences with students on their drafts.  Example topics from conferences include how to develop thesis statements, reduce wordiness, increase word choice specificity, create dialogue tags, introduce setting, organize outlines, avoid adverbs, use vivid verbs, and others.