Well, the first quarter is in the books! I overheard one of my students say, "Wow, I can't believe we're already done with one quarter of 8th grade!" I'm going to take that as a good sign - time flies when you're having fun!
A note about quarter grades...
When you receive your child's report card, you will notice that each class gives four separate grades. The letter grade is the indicator of your child's academic progress in each course. In addition to the letter grade, your child receives a score in three life-skills areas: Respect, Responsibility, and Engagement. These three areas are the academic behaviors that we believe contribute to a successful student - and a successful person in everyday life. Click here to read the descriptions for each of the life skills grade and the scale that is used to evaluate your child.
In many ways this first quarter is an adjustment period for many students - teacher expectations are different, homework load tends to be different, etc. I have always felt that the most growth happens during the second and third quarters of the school year, so I'm looking forward to this time of year!
A look ahead in ELA...
We have started our second major unit of the school year recently - Influence and Choice. The literary part of the unit focuses on characterization and character analysis. We began by looking at ourselves - how we interpret and group one another as well as how we assign personality traits to one another. We eventually moved on to how authors create characters and what we as readers have to look for when closely analyzing a character. Starting small, with short pieces of text - then moving on to short stories and eventually a novel, students will become adept at identifying character traits, and then providing evidence from the text and an explanation of that evidence to clearly demonstrate their thinking.
In writing, we noticed that sentence problems (fragments, comma splices, and fused sentences) seemed to be an area of need based on the results of the first quarter writing piece. Therefore, that is what we are going to be to focusing on during grammar instruction. We begin by looking at writing, identifying the problem sentences, and then applying three fixes that students actually already have in their "writing toolbox" from the beginning of the year grammar unit on sentence structure. Our formal writing piece of the second quarter is argumentative in nature with an increased emphasis in constructing refuting statements to counterclaims. In addition to the writing piece, shortly after the Christmas holiday, we will be having in-class debates on the topics that each student wrote about.
Don't forget the Independent Reading Requirement that continues during each quarter of the school year. To read more about those requirements, click here.
As always, if you have a concern or a question about anything - please send me an email or give me a call at school.
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