In middle school at St. Gabriel, we do try to give a 90 minute focus to ELA. On the schedule for the class, you may see that students have this back to back, or it may be separated. Based on our Units of Study, it is sometimes best to arrange this 90 minutes and break it up depending on what skills we are working on and what time frame that needs. While our schedule may say 45 minutes for English and 45 minutes for Literature, Mrs. Doenges looks at this as 90 minutes a day to navigate Writing time, Grammar time, and Reading time.

This page will be specific to Writing, English, and Grammar Skills.

With our school year, we will be doing a variety of items online to allow us to switch from in-person to online learning as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Students will be expected to use Google Classroom and check their Email daily to ensure there is no new correspondence. I will be posting assignments via Google Classroom, so that when students are absent, they are still able to access things to complete their work as to not fall behind. When available, I will include a digital copy of something, so students do not need various items from the classroom.

Students will have access to their school-issued Chromebooks while in school, but when at home, they will potentially need access to technology with internet capabilities. I also encourage students to have access to a camera that can send images of assignments not completed with the Google suite.

There are numerous websites and apps that can be used other than the Google suite. One notable one is YouTube can be used for various videos. Other options could include Flipgrid, EdPuzzle, Padlet, IXL, CommonLit, etc. Rest assured that I will work with students to explain how to use these various tools.

While writing, many of our grammar skills can be incorporated, so students can practice. However, sometimes students need more experience with skills. To do this, we do sometimes have mini-lessons on various grammar skills and punctuation such as how to use complex punctuation marks (colons, semicolons, hyphens/em-dash, parentheses--to name a few), various sentence structure types, and the 8 parts of speech. These mini-lessons can be used and assigned depending on student need for the skills.

We also use Middle School Patterns of Power to examine how patterns are used in our writing. This uses mentor sentences and explores the notice, focus phrase, apply, edit procedure.

We are also using Words their Way as a vocabulary program for the students.

IXL is another program that we could use to work on ELA skills. We do the diagnostic test frequently to give suggestions for what we can continue to work on.

Writing/English grades will be evaluated by the newly adopted ELA standards. However, you may see grades given by percentages on the grade book to show the percentage that your student understands of a topic. That will not be factored into a final grade but will be shown on the scale below. I will input those grades as FORMATIVE, so you can know how a student is doing with that skill.