Trimester 1
This trimester, we will be going back to basics and reviewing story elements such as parts of a story from the exposition to the resolution. We will also dive deeper into various forms of conflict, as well as the difference between mood and tone in an author's writing. We will be identifying themes and provide evidence to support our claims. We will also explore the following essential questions: How do we decide what is true? and Is conflict always bad?
Through many voices, we will discover what it means to come of age during the pivotal middle school transition. We will also explore how our voices and experience can shape the world.
We will open our writing unit by learning how to write both a personal narrative, and a creative narrative. We will begin studying the morphology of words, including Greek and Latin roots in order to better dissect the words we read. Proper sentence structure and syntax will be embedded in writing units as we begin finding our voices as writers.
Finally, we will begin our first novel, The Watsons Go To Birmingham, 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. This novel explores growing up in the face of adversity, and will tie directly into our essential questions of how the human spirit can triumph in the face of adversity, whether conflict is always bad, and how we decide what is true.