Program Update: Language Arts with Lisa and Cilla

Happy Spring from your Language Arts department!

6th Grade:

Sixth graders just finished the novel, One Crazy Summer, and are preparing to write a literary analysis essay.  Last week they completed an exercise, “Analyzing a quote,” which helped them generate ideas and organize the information they need for a body paragraph. This exercise involves four steps. They found a passage from the novel they felt was significant for understanding a character and they copied that passage out in full and centered it on a blank page. For step one and two students wrote down the background information and context of their passage, noting its setting, characters, and plot. The 3rd step, annotation, asks students to make inferences and interpret what motivates the words and actions in their quoted passage. I encourage them to examine the craft of a quotation as well as the content. Observing how the author reveals the information, through artful language and word choice, will often enhance or reinforce their interpretation of the passage. The final step draws upon an exercise they practiced in March, labeling their interpretation of key quotes with a word or phrase. I ask them to zoom out and write down in one or two sentences what the passage is about—what is the underlying “thematic topic.”  What they write for this step provides the message of their topic sentence and the concluding insight of their body paragraph. Steps one and two can transform into the transition sentences that follow the topic sentence and serve to both orient their reader in the novel and prepare for their quotation. What follows their  quotation of the passage is their analysis and interpretation of the passage, which they draw from their best annotations. Once they have practiced a few body paragraphs, they will be ready to write an introduction with a thesis statement.

7th Grade:

As spring sprung and sunshine finally became a more regular visitor, 7th-grade students wrapping up a unit on figurative language. While traditionally we might use poetry as the vehicle for this type of study, for the past two years I’ve been using song lyrics to hook students’ attention and get them thinking more intentionally about why a writer chooses the particular words they do and how it impacts the listener’s experience of the song. We practiced identifying figurative language and poetic devices in the work of various artists and thinking about why the songwriters might have chosen to write the lyrics as they did: what were they hoping to make the listener feel or think? As a final project, students chose a songwriter and a song or songs with which to do a deeper analysis, ultimately writing either an essay or a paragraph about what they learned. Ask your student which artist they chose and what particular aspects about their songwriting they chose to explore.

We are now well into a Shakespeare unit with Tara in Drama/Language Arts collaboration. Tara and I are working with students to help them go beyond “just” memorizing lines in Shakespearean English and really take time to dig into the plot and the themes of Twelfth Night. To demonstrate their understanding, students were asked to come up with a new setting for the play which would not only be interesting or fun, but would serve to enhance the themes and the audience’s understanding of the play. Students created an artist’s concept statement and a vision board to communicate their ideas. These will be posted for the audience to view before their play performances. Their final project is a creative retelling of a scene or scenes from Twelfth Night in their chosen “resetting”. Ask your student what scenes they are choosing to rewrite, and in what type of setting they are placing their story–what are they hoping you will get out of it?

8th Grade:

So much has happened in the lives of our 8th-graders since the last update! They have been to Rome and have made choices about high school next year. To parallel a bit of the tumultuousness of their own lives, students read verse novels about young people around their age going through some intense experiences of their own. In her article for The Open University’s Reading for Pleasure (“How verse novels can engage reluctant readers”), Tia Fisher states the advantages of verse novels well: “Verse novels are immersive, immediate and compelling, but readers can also revisit each poem to spend time, infer, analyze the layout and poetic devices; find the deeper meanings tucked inside.” Ask your student what it was like to read a novel in verse. What did they learn from such an immediate experience of another’s feelings and thoughts? Did they choose to write poetry for their final verse novel project?

Post-Rome, students wrote travel memoirs and focused on vividly making an experience of theirs tangible for a reader. They were to craft a piece that fully engaged their reader’s senses and they used focused peer feedback and guided rewriting to get there. It has been fun to see the variety of memories students have chosen to share: the tone of their experiences runs from the profound to the silly to…pigeons. Lots of pigeons! You’ll have a chance to read these works and see photos from their travels in a hallway display after spring break. 

We’ve since jumped into a comedy unit. Students are reading non-fiction articles about theories of humor and categories of comedy. We’ve used what we’ve learned to dissect some sketches, jokes and stories and are learning about ways we can elicit humor in our writing. As a final project, students will produce either a comedic skit, video, or short story. This is my first time teaching comedy writing and I am excited to see what our wonderfully wacky students come up with!

The final big writing project for eighth graders this year will be a graduation speech. Every student will write one, and though it is not required of them, any student who would like to speak at graduation typically has the opportunity to do so. We’ll use speechwriting to talk about purpose and audience and to practice public speaking, even if it is to an audience of just one’s family or advisory. I’m excited to hear what they are taking away from their years at Explorer West and what they have learned. Thank you for all your support of our amazing young people!