Hello!
My name is Mrs. Stevens, and I'm so excited to have you in my ELA class this year! I look forward to working with each of you in order to improve our writing skills and create great writing pieces. We will have 6 units of study this year, along with daily practice assignments focused on identifying and correcting grammatical errors. I will post the lesson and assignment each day if you would like to refer back to them for review, so remember to check Schoology on a regular basis.
Journal prompts (20%)
Daily Check-In (20%)
Always come to class with a pencil! We will be writing a lot this year in our notebooks.
Speaking of notebooks, these will always stay in the classroom. You will have a designated class bin for your notebook.
Computer should be fully charged.
Stay in your assigned seat unless otherwise noted.
School policy states cell phones and air pods are not allowed in the classroom.
No drinks (water is great!) or food in the classroom.
Be respectful to everyone!
Unit 1's main areas of focus are establishing procedures for and setting up for writer's workshop, communicating professionally in the school setting, and getting to know ourselves as writers. In this unit we will be brainstorming writing ideas as well as writing a professional email.
This unit's main area of focus is crafting a narrative with dialogue, a clear beginning, middle, and end, and which uses sensory language, mood, characterization, and conflict to create a theme. This unit's assessments include a pre and post assessment in which students create a fictional story.
This unit's main areas of focus are performing quality research, using well-crafted thesis statements and relevant information to write informatively, and using MLA format to create accurate works cited and in-text citations. The culminating project for this unit will be a podcast that details key findings from student research and relates back to the thesis statement. Additional unit assessments include an informative writing pre-assessment.
This unit's main areas of focus are ethically using relevant researched evidence (ethos), logical reasoning (logos), and effective counterclaims to convincingly support (pathos) a position in a debate as well as a written argument. The culminating project will revolve around a business proposal and group presentation. Additional unit assessments include an argumentative writing pre-assessment.
This unit's main areas of focus are finding, understanding the purpose of, and using poetic language in "non-poetic" texts, analyzing and comparing poems of the same theme, and crafting and performing poetry that uses structure, rhyme scheme, and figurative language. This unit's engaging scenario is a poetry "slam," or live poetry performance.
This unit's main area of focus is refining our revising and editing skills in all of the year's focus genres (informative, narrative, argumentative, and poetry) by revising them and blending them to create a digital children's book.