mclassy

Middle Childhood Language Arts Social Studies -Y
....currently teaching 7th grade writing :)


View my profile on Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh - TeachersPayTeachers.com

Sunday, September 28, 2014

Fairy Tales: Writing with Dependent Clauses!


Everyone loves fairy tales, right? Get your students excited about adding some flair to their writing! Students begin by writing a short fairy tale--and they end with adding dependent clauses.
Students immediately put their knowledge of sentence structure and clauses into action with this lesson. Give it a try!
Click below for the TpT link to the product:
Writing Complex Sentences with Fairy Tales Lesson on TpT


Word of the Week Program

word of the week display


On Mondays, as our bell work, the students are presented with the "Word of the Week". We do the typical dictionary hunt, discuss prefixes/suffixes when necessary, use examples sentences, and create our own examples.

However, I encourage students to use the WOW in their writing.  On our WOW sheets, there is a box set aside for a teacher signature. Students earn a point for successfully using a WOW in their major writing pieces. Several students are using the WOW in their journal entries, too!

As an added bonus--If students come across a WOW in their everyday reading, they fill out a word bubble with the word used in the sentence. See images below.


I selected the WOW list based on words that middle school students should know and words I've always found interesting.

Quarter One:
abominable
luminous
adroitly
camaraderie
rapscallion
jabber
barricade
charisma
egregious

Quarter Two:
uncanny
swagger
attentive
fastidiously
apprehensive
behoove
nostalgia
adversary
monotonous

Classroom Set-up 2014-2015

Hey All! I wanted to post a quick tour of the classroom this year. This should eventually lead to a few post that describe my W.o.W program as well as the "Breaking Dreadful Writing Habits" program, too!

Still stuck in the stone-age...no white board! I use dry erase markers to write on the chalk board. A "magic eraser" works well to erase :) 
This is our homework board! To the right of the day of the week is the homework for the night. To the left, we usually list important information about that day or if they should BYOT.

Learning Objectives: I teach 7th grade English--usually we work on the same standard for weeks at a time. 
Do you post learning objectives in your classroom? It is part of out OTES evaluation. We need to include the standard covered along with an "I can" statement.

Our writing folders. Students will keep their published writing in these folders during the school year.
We often go back to our own writing from the beginning of the year to reapply recent knowledge. For instance, the students will go back to their writing from 1st or 2nd quarter and revise their writing to include different sentence structure.

Dreadful Writing Habits (A year-long process of breaking bad writing habits)
The Dreadful Writing Habits are mini-lessons that we complete in our WNB a few times a quarter. Students learn how to fix these habits and go back to revise their previous writing. We post the habit on this bulletin board to remind them of the habits we have completed. Once we complete a habit, they are to avoid it for the rest of the year (in all their classes)!


Formal vs. Informal writing poster. We use this posted as reference when we start a new writing piece. We always discuss whether our writing should be formal or informal before we begin. Students have a similar copy of this chart in their WNB.