Overview
Middle school students will spend each class practicing and honing writing and reading skills through a wide variety of activities. Students will build on their prior knowledge while they increase their proficiency in reading and writing. Please read over the detailed curriculum description to get a sense of our areas of focus.
Welcome to Middle School
Language Arts and Literature
Ms. Annie Kasprick
Welcome to Middle School Language Arts and Literature! My first goal is to foster a love of reading and writing in my students. In my classes, students will have the opportunity to practice and refine those skills each day through a wide variety of lessons, activities and hands-on practice.
Curriculum
Basic elements of writing:
Review/model/practice writing
Practice building effective sentences, paragraphs, and essays
By the time students graduate from middle school, they will have had experience in how to effectively write a multiple paragraph essay including thesis.
Students will practice in writing different genres, writing for different audiences and for different purposes.
Writing
- Personal narratives
- Fictional narratives
- Paragraph responses
- Literary essays
Language Activities
- Reviewing and practicing rules for punctuation, grammar and usage
- Editing for errors in writing
- Spelling rules
Sentence Activities
- Sentence basics and identifying sentence types
- Sentence combining
- Sentence variety
- Strategies for writing effective sentences
Reading/Literature
- Reading a wide variety of genres, reading a large number of books
- Reading independently in class and at home
- Reading for different purposes
- Understanding what is read
- Understanding an author’s purpose
- Understanding tone
- Critical thinking, analyzing, evaluating
- Building and practicing reading skills and strategies: questioning, predicting, making inferences, making connections, sequencing, and using text clues
- Acquiring awareness/self-evaluation of strengths and weaknesses as a reader
- Building vocabulary
- Responding to reading/literature in a variety of ways
- Reading young adult novels and informational texts and participating in literature circles
- Reading themed selections from literature anthologies
- Practice using the text (evidence) to support answers to questions and points in an essay
- Student and teacher led book talks and projects around independent reading books
Homework Policy
Please check your child’s planner each night so that you can help him or her keep track of homework assignments. Homework is due at the beginning of class. If homework is one day late, the highest grade possible is a 90%. Late work must be turned in within 10 days. Assignments that are due on Google Classroom must be submitted before coming to class.
If a student cannot turn in an assignment because he or she was sick or had a legitimate reason to be absent, work can be turned in late and will not be marked down provided it is turned in when the student returns. Parents can email if the student needs additional time. Generally one make up day is given for each day absent.
Grading Policy
Assessments: Students will be regularly assessed both formally and informally through class discussion and questions, class work, homework, essays and other writing assignments, quizzes, tests, presentations, and projects. Students will be given clear learning targets aligned with state standards. Criteria will be used for writing assignments, presentations and literature projects. Assignments will be given both for students to practice new skills and to show mastery over skills they have been taught.
Participation and Effort
Students are expected to come prepared for class, arrive on time and be fully engaged in lessons and learning activities.
- Student comes to class on time ready to work.
- Student is prepared for class (comes to class with all needed materials and assignments).
- Student is fully engaged in class, participates, and uses class time well.
- Student does not distract others.