It's about time!

Well, I had certainly planned on blogging more often than once a month -- and hopefully I will have a better track record in the future -- but I forgot how busy the beginning of the school year can be. We've established procedures and routines and begun the slow, sometimes painful work of remembering what we've already learned so we can figure out what we need to hit hardest this year. The good news is that I finally feel confident that I know each of my 90-some students by name (first, if not last) and quite a bit about them. Because reading and writing are, in essence, the sharing of ideas, we do likewise in class everyday.

I had hoped the students would be publishing to their own blogs by now, but real life never works out quite like we'd have planned, right? For starters, the number of laptops and iPods available is slightly less than the number of classroom teachers who daily request them. In other words, it's "take a number" right now where technology is concerned. Also, until students have been issued their own google accounts -- something scheduled for later this fall at the earliest -- they can't blog anyway. I've been fortunate to get computers some last week and all this week, though, and we are hitting our descriptive essays hard. Hopefully I'll have some sample student work for you soon! As I see my students describing their favorite objects and wrestling with the juicy stories about how these became their favorite objects, I'm realizing what a neat bunch of kids I have. It'll be worth the wait!

In reading, we are working hard on context clues. Students have learned that ways to find the meaning of unknown words in a text include: 1. taking a careful look at the surrounding words and phrases; 2. looking for antonyms (words that mean the opposite of the word in question) and synonyms (words that mean the same); and 3. locating definitions -- often offset by commas -- nearby. Understanding and utilizing context clues will be a big part of the Reader's Journey test, sometime mid-October. It helps that, at the same time, we've also been reviewing root words and studying suffixes (ize, tion, and able). It's fair to say that decoding words is getting easier as our reading tool belts are becoming heavier.

This week, we're also adding literary elements such as setting (time + place), characters, plot, and conflict to the mix. Specifically, we'll be looking for these elements in some historical fiction about Japanese internment camps. Beforehand, we'll gain some background knowledge of this unpleasant piece of American past. Because my students are generally sensitive and intuitive, I'm betting they'll have lots to say about these texts. You'll have to ask them what they've learned!

There's never enough time in the day, it seems, but we are making good progress overall. My goal is to get through the material needed for our first round of assessments early so we can spend some time on review. Skills in reading and writing are not so different than those gained anywhere else -- like in sports or music. It takes practice. Making sure your kids are reading at home will help them practice reading skills, of course, but also make connections to the writing process. All in all, it'll be time well spent.

First Things First

Hello, fellow Wildcats! If you or someone you love has me for seventh grade reading, writing or extended reading, you're in the right place.

Using this blog as a techno-tool, I'll work hard to keep you informed of our objectives, classroom activities (including assignments and assessments), and the progress we are sure to make. Feel free to leave comments and/or questions. You may also email me at kfriesen@gips.org.

In writing class, students will be creating their own blogs as space to publish the great work they're bound to do. Links to those blogs will be available on this site as well. Students may be asked to respond to one another's posts as homework, and I hope parents would do the same. Writing is a tough process, and we can use all the encouragement we can get!

In case you're wondering, we'll be responding to some great literature together as a writing class this year (including, but not limited to, The Outsiders, Tuck Everlasting, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas). Students will also enjoy daily opportunities to participate in book clubs with their choices of shared or independent anchor books. Our reading text will be Reader's Journey, and we'll use Write Source and Everyday Editing (as well as a hodgepodge of writers' workshop materials) to aid in the writing process. We can all use a little help enlarging our vocabularies, so we'll be looking at word parts (roots, prefixes, and suffixes) as strategies to reading comprehension. Most importantly, we'll be learning to work together as a community of learners, which includes: confidently sharing our ideas; patiently listening to others; graciously providing and receiving constructive criticism; learning to agree and disagree appropriately; and, together, finding the power that is present in each of our individual stories.

Just for fun, do you know how the phrase "in a nutshell" can best be described? 

a.  as a simile

b.  as personification
c.  as an idiom

d.  as hyperbole

This year is going to rock! I just know it. :)