Our first day of Language Arts class is Thursday and I’m so excited to be your student’s LA teacher for the first two trimesters of this year. (I teach 8th grade seminar the third trimester.) I’ll do my best to send out email updates with happenings from class.
I’m a big believer in building classroom culture through content. We start our first class by reproducing an in-class theatrical version of Beowulf. Our studies this year will explore the hero’s journey as we unravel why so many stories have similar threads. We’ll read texts closely and critically. Using Beowulf as our foundation, we’ll also write our own hero’s journey stories. What do we want to teach our readers through the power of story? How can we manipulate our own mythology? We’ll focus on sentence structure, paragraph development, idea organization, and peer critique. Learning to give kind, helpful, and specific feedback is an invaluable skill and we’ll practice that a lot as well. Our hero’s journey project will culminate with a “coffeehouse reading” at a local Coffeehouse on the evening of Thursday, December 12th. Please save the date.
There is inevitably project spillover, but the hope is that students are getting most of their work completed in class. The one exception to this is reading. The brain research shows that reading is the most important factor in brain development for kids 11-15. Students should have a book with them at school and we’ll spend time during our first few weeks “dating” books and creating reading plans. I also have links to good book recommendation resources. Students should be reading 30 minutes most (all?) nights. If students wish to listen to audio books to fulfill this reading requirement, that’s great — although I encourage students to track with text in hand whenever possible. Also —if your student doesn’t have his/her/their own public library card, this is a great time to get one! Students are welcome to bring well-labeled Kindles or Nooks to class, but they are not permitted to read on phones.
Upcoming due dates: (subject to change)
- Rambling Autobiography tentatively due via Google Classroom by 8am on Thursday, 8/23. I’ll likely introduce this in class on Friday.
- Reading Plan — tentatively due by 8am on Tuesday, 8/28. I’ll introduce this the week of 8/19
Thank you so much in advance for your support. I’m looking forward to a great year. -JF