"You Are" for My Middle School, Language Arts Classroom

A couple of years ago, a pin on Pinterest inspired me to create this You Are list for my 4th grade classroom. Last year, I moved to middle school, where I teach 8th grade language arts. I still love the idea of this list, but the one I had no longer worked for my students and what I asked of them in my classroom. Here, then, is the one I created for my language arts classroom and my older students. You Are file to download. I've started using 4Shared instead of Google Documents, since I was having so many issues with Google Docs. Please let me know if you can't access these. By the way, this is on a wall in my house! We are moving into a new building, and I will try to remember to post a photo of it in the context of the school as soon as it is up.

Close Reading

Recently, I attended one of my district's workshops for middle school English-language arts teachers. The idea was to give us some instructional strategies, particularly for those teachers that hadn't begun to implement Common Core last year. This will be the first year my district requires Common Core standards at the middle school level. While I supplemented our state/district standards and benchmarks with Common Core standards last year, I was still excited to have some ideas tossed my direction. One of the lessons we were shown was how to use Close Reading more effectively. Here is the poster I've made to put up in my classroom to help my students understand what I am asking of them when I indicate 1st, 2nd, and 3rd reads. In case it is useful to anyone else, here' the link to get it: Close Reading It is formatted for a 11" x 17" paper.