Standards: Common Core State Standards
Assessment: Portfolio of reading and writing
This course is designed tointroducenon-native,English-speaking students’skills inextended reading andacademic writing. The goal is to help the students grow and develop these abilities as well as cultivate critical thinking skills to help them succeed inmiddleschool. The course employs the use of the workshop model from Columbia University, which prioritizes students taking notes and filling out notebooks as a benchmark of measuring progress.
In grade 6 and grade 7，awide variety of mini-lessons, mentor texts, multimedia, and teacher guidance are used in order to support the student in this course with the aim of setting them up to succeed in future middle school and high school English classes. Additionalsupport and strategies are applied to help ensure the ESL learners are able to adapt to the needs of a 100 percent immersive English-speaking environment by Grade 9, and develop effective communication skills.
Ingrade 8，studentswill not only developtheirreading, writing, and conversation skills but alsotheircomprehension and analysis skills that will lastthema lifetime.Themain units of study in writing include: Investigative Journalism, The Literary Essay, and Position Papers: Research and Argument. Writers will compose news and investigative articles through the lens of a journalist, write literary essays with a focus on themes within texts, and conclude the year by writing a position paper based on evidence.Themain reading units of study include: A Novel Approach (in which we compare and contrast two authors and their shared experiences), Dystopian Book Clubs, and Critical Literacy (in which we examine contemporary fiction).This coursewill build onstudents'current skills through upbeat writing workshops, novel studies, and creative writing.Studentswill spend time reading a variety of texts as a class, in groups and individually.Theywill discover the joy and creativity that can be a part of the writing, reading, and thinking process inthis year.
