First Writing Piece of the Year!

We are currently in the midst of the drafting process for the first major writing piece of the 2014 school year.  While we have completed a number of short, informal pieces, the personal essay will be the first work taken all the way through the writing process.

The personal essay is meant to be a reflective writing.  In past years, students have written numerous personal narratives - an event focused type of writing.  This is what I call the "My Trip to Disney World" type of writing.  In seventh grade students wrote a personal memoir.  The memoir focused on an object/time period and the relationship of the writer to that object/time period.  In a personal essay, the focus is on lessons/insights learned by the writer - usually through some sort of life experience.  At this age, reflective writing can be quite difficult.  Even though most teenagers love talking about themselves, it usually tends to be superficial.  We want the students to really examine their topics and discover what they have learned from them.  

The title of this personal essay reflects the topic choice - "____________ and Me." My students have selected topics ranging from sports (Basketball and Me) to nature (Fishing and Me) to hobbies (Music and Me) as well as their families (Family and Me).  We are focusing the essay on what lessons these people/topics have taught the students that could be applied elsewhere in their lives.  To help them provide support for their thinking, we are having the students use the DRAPES strategies (Dialogue, Rhetorical question, Analogy, Personal experience, Example, and Statistics).  Other instructional focus areas include the use of simile and metaphor, as well as proper subject-verb agreement.

Students will need to have their first draft completed by next week Tuesday, October 21st.  Feel free to ask your child about his/her topic and perhaps even take a look at what they have written so far!  

Independent Reading

As we hit the mid-point of the first quarter, I wanted to write a post about the 8th grade ELA independent reading requirement.  We have five targeted goals that have been the driving force behind our program:

• To engage and motivate students to learn about things that interest them.
• To promote a love of reading.
• To build vocabulary.
• To build knowledge of the world.
• To build students' reading stamina.

With these goals in mind we have implemented our independent reading requirement.  In this recurring assignment, we are asking students to read 650 minutes over a four week period.  This roughs out to be an average of 25 minutes of reading per day.  To help support their efforts, students generally receive about 15 minutes of time in class to read three days per week.  

Every four weeks students receive a log page where they can record the number of minutes they read each time they sit down to read.  The logs are collected at the end of the four week period and a grade is recorded in the independent reading category of my gradebook.  This category is worth a total of 10% of the final grade in my class.  Click on the independent reading requirement link above to see the grading scale.

In addition, students complete a status check every week where they record the name of the novel and the page they are on.  This allows me to see how quickly each of my students finish their books as well as what kinds of books they are reading.  A side benefit is that the status also provides me with a number of titles that I read.  I can see the trending book selections, and make sure I stay current!

As an 8th grade ELA department, we also have set a book goal for the entire grade.  By the end of the school year we would like the 8th grade students to have completed 7,000 books.  It seems ambitious, but we all think these kids can do it!