So, summer school. There are many reasons why students must make up a semester’s worth of work: I’ve asked the current group, and the reasons range from making up from their freshmen year for health reasons to experiencing teachers they found…challenges with. Some teachers do not accept late work, and life got away from them. The cool thing is this allows me to use ‘creative constraints’ — what are the most valuable, transferrable, and interesting skills in #ELA?
In fact, if you are an English/Language Arts teacher in secondary education, consider your own framework and power curriculum. I’m not saying I have the answers, not by any means. But I will say it’s a creative and professional challenge I enjoy.
Some of these intentional moves include (for this year):
- Building reading stamina with highly engaging texts.
- Students choose their own books from my classroom library
- Students may choose a book they were supposed to read in a prior grade, but didn’t get to it
- I provide 30 minutes of classtime just for reading
- Each student has a quick reader’s response journal they keep
- Quick Writes: building sentences, paragraphs, and essays
- There will be two short essays:
- Literary analysis (use a short story; I’m planning on using The Lottery
- Argumentative writing
- There will be two short essays:
- Poetry Unit
- Professional Communications
I have to thank Marcus Luther for the sentence idea. I took his work on sentence writing, created a hyper doc to the examples across the internet, and gave students the subject: a green dragon.
Summer school is only four weeks long, but two and a half hours a morning. A few more students joined me today, and it’s a full class. We’re moving fast, but so far, so good. Today I had a mini-lesson about sentence and paragraph writing, and challenged them to not think about paragraphs as being a set number of sentences, but as a complete idea.
This is my example of the sentences: if I didn’t do some correctly, I have no issue with being told. As an ELA teacher, I know my strengths and challenges; grammatical terms are not my jam.
*Inspired by Marcus Luther @MarcusLuther6
And this is where things got fun: I asked students to write three paragraphs after the mini-lesson today. Going through my sentence examples, I asked them to decide which ones would be best suited for narrative, explanatory/information, or argumentative: this led to a discussion of those terms and making some writing decisions.
Green Dragon Paragraph Writing
I can’t wait to share what they come up with. I think I’ll work on my Dragon Lawyer skills and defend him against the murder charges of the knight.
If you’ve ever had to come up with a quick curriculum what have you done that’s had a lasting and meaningful impact?