Middle School English has taken on a different look this year. Class is based on a Reader’s and Writer’s Workshop model. During Reader’s Workshop this trimester, students have been selecting their own titles, allowing them to follow their own interests and read at an individualized level and pace. Through one-on-one work with us, class mini-lessons, and partner shares, students have been developing the stamina and skills to understand and enjoy longer, more complex titles. We encourage our students to read a variety of genres; they have set personal reading goals and tracked their progress throughout the trimester in their Reader’s Notebooks. To showcase their understanding of their independent titles, students write letter essays about their reading. Topics covered include understanding character, making inferences, and supporting ideas using textual details. Students have also presented book commercials to each other, persuading their peers read similar titles. The excitement in the room was palpable as they discussed why their books were worth selecting.
Since September in addition to their letter essays, students have been writing
expository, narrative, and descriptive pieces. Using their Writer’s Notebooks as a seed bed for ideas, students have been practicing different types of writing skills from how to hook a reader and write a thesis statement to varying sentence structure by playing with adjectives. They even spent a class observing the outdoors and then turned those observations into a poem that focused on sensory details and rich vocabulary. They practiced telling a story with very few words.
Students are able to additionally practice their grammar (compound sentences, compound-complex sentences, complex sentences beginning with subordinate clauses, opening adjectives and delayed adjectives) when they craft their original sentences for their weekly Word Voyage lessons based on classic Latin and Greek roots.
This has been a busy trimester, and we continue to develop the skills that make our students lifelong readers and writers. We are looking forward to building on the foundation we’ve laid in the first trimester as we head into the winter term. Second trimester highlights will include book clubs - again self-selected but with more than one student reading the same book at the same time to allow for rich discussion - and a study of poetry culminating in The Country School’s longest and most celebrated tradition, The MacLane Poetry Recitation.
