Welcome to a New School Year!

Welcome to a new school year. I am so excited to meet all of you! You can check in here to find out what activities, projects, and assignments are happening in my language arts classes.

In the first week of school, we'll begin with some introductions. It's important that we start getting to know one another since we'll be learning together all year long. Students will write "Opening Day Letters" to help with this process. We'll also think about goals for the upcoming school year, thinking and writing about our definitions of success. We'll read Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem "What Is Success" for inspiration and ideas.

The first unit of study this year will focus on narratives--reading, writing, and analyzing. We'll use the following questions to guide our work:
What is a story?
What is a hero?
Why do we write/tell stories?
Where do stories come from?
Over the course of the unit, we'll draw from a variety of sources, including our district-adopted Springboard books, local stories, and more. We'll even be attending a play at Perseverance Theatre: Peter and the Starcatcher. (Half of the eighth grade will attend the play on September 8th, and the other half of the eighth grade will attend on September 14th.) Folks from Perseverance will be visiting language arts classrooms to prepare students for this exciting opportunity.

In addition to learning about narrative structure, literary elements, and the Hero's Journey archetype, we'll be reviewing some of the essentials of grammar and syntax: parts of speech and sentence structure. Again, we'll draw from a variety of sources, and we'll focus on how our understanding of these elements can help us strengthen our skills as writers and editors.

I'm looking forward to a great year of learning with all of you!