Late April into Early May
8th Grade: With only five weeks left, we have reached the ‘home-stretch!’ For the first week, the eighth graders will be working on a cumulative grammar unit to review and refresh the skills they have learned throughout junior high English. After that, they will be working on their final paper of the year (yay!), which combines a descriptive, expository, narrative, and research paper all in one. It’s a topic I think they will enjoy and should have fun with, so I’m excited to start that. We’ll also continue working with word roots to substitute for vocabulary.
7th Grade: After a nice, relaxing break, the seventh graders should be well rested and ready to start the toughest unit we will study this year: writing an MLA-style research paper. While it sounds challenging, it’s actually not too bad. Seventh graders will be taking diligent notes in class about the basics of MLA-style research papers. Once the basics are taken care of, the topic will be assigned (one I think they will enjoy researching), and we’ll begin the necessary steps. In addition to writing, seventh graders will continue with vocabulary. Through these two years of teaching junior high English, I have noticed that the vocabulary curriculum is not as effective (in the long run) as I have hoped it would be. I’ve decided that it’s much more effective to study the etymology (word roots) of words rather than individual words. That way, if a student comes to a word he or she has never encountered before, they are much more likely to figure out the word’s meaning through word roots rather than individual vocabulary words. For example, students typically study fifteen words per unit. The chance that one of those words will be encountered is minimal. However, when studying word roots, students have a much higher chance in using this information since words are composed of root words. Take the word “commemorate” for example. Students studying etymology would know that “co” refers to ”together, with people”, and ”memor” refers to “remember” (and ‘ate’ is a suffix refering to a verb), which means the word ’commemorate’ means ‘remembering someone or something together as a group.’ While the last six weeks of school is not an optimal time to start studying etymology, it’s better than never! I’m excited to work this into the seventh grade curriculum, and I’m confident they will put this to good use in the future!
