I have already mentioned that I am trying to really evaluate what worked well this year and what I want to adjust for next year. My position will change next year as I will only be responsible for reading, writing, and social studies, rather than all content areas. I am not sure what my exact schedule will be, but my partner teacher and I are hoping that we will each be able to have 2 1/2 hours with each grade level per day. One day a week we would only have the students for 1 1/2 hours because they would go to their dance class for the other hour.
My thoughts are still in a rough outline form, but here is my list of essentials that I want to incorporate into my classroom and resources that have inspired me. This will be adjusted and further developed over the summer. I will be meeting with my director early on in the summer to make sure that my vision is okay with her so that I can make any adjustments as needed. Out of the 2 1/2 hour time block, I am tentatively thinking of having a 15 minute read aloud, 10 minutes of word study, followed by reading and writing workshop for 40 minutes each, and finishing up with 45 minutes of social studies. One the shorter day I am planning on not having social studies.
POETRY:
I have been very happy with daily poetry using Atwell's resource Naming the World: A Year of Poetry and Lessons as a foundation that I have been doing for the last bit of the school year. I know that I want to have poetry have a bigger presence in my classroom year-round, rather than just having a poetry unit. However, I am not sure if it will be feasible to have daily poetry. From what I gathered from Atwell, it seemed that she does the daily poetry as the only shared text with her class, which I took to mean that she does not have a read-aloud novel. I am not quite ready to give up my read-aloud novels, so I thought that maybe I would compromise by having poetry Friday where I would replace the read aloud with poetry for one day of the week. I know that it is less than ideal, but at least poetry will have a more consistent presence than it did this year. I chose Friday since it would align with the popular poetry Friday posts in the blog world.
WORD STUDY
This year was my first year trying out Words Their Way. I like that my students did consistent word study, and that it was differentiated by their level. This year I introduced new sorts on Mondays, had students practice all week with their sort (I adapted a word study form from a Words Their Way book), and had their quiz on the sort on Fridays. Next year I am going to change it a bit and have students on different rotations. For example, each group will meet with me on one day of the week and work independently or with a partner with their sort on the other days of the week. This year I had five groups, so if it ends up being that way next year than I would meet with a group for each day.
READING AND WRITING WORKSHOPS:
I will have traditional reading and writing workshops starting with whole class mini-lessons and then move into strategy groups and one and one conferences. I will use the CAFE menu format for reading, and I am planning on creating a similar menu for writing to help students familiarize themselves with the writing strands according to our state writing rubric: content and ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Even though it does not make a pretty acronym like CAFE it will still be a consistent idea of having whole class, small group, and one on one components with each student working on a goal to improve at all times.
My thoughts on literacy are strongly influenced by: Nancie Atwell, Kylene Beers, Cris Tovani, Aimee Buckner (I have her second book ordered from Amazon), Ralph Fletcher and JoAnn Portalupi, and Two Writing Teachers' blog.
This year my students have had a half hour of SSR, and one of the areas that I need to get approval from my director is to have reading workshop instead. I cannot imagine how I would be able to do what I want to do if we cut a half hour SSR out of the schedule; however, if I am able to have the students do their independent reading as part of their reading workshop, I will be able to accomplish a lot more. Don't get me wrong, SSR is one of my favorite times of the day since I love reading, but I think I could help my students more by conferencing and giving them individualized instruction tailored to their needs while they also get a chance to read self selected texts.
READING INTERVENTION
This year our school had reading intervention pull-outs for the first time. They also have an afterschool program for further support to get students to grade-level in reading and math that they have had for years. I would love if I could have an intervention push-in rather than pull-out during reading workshop time so that students who need intervention would have instruction that aligns with our classroom philosophy. The same teacher helps with after school programs, so it would be great for her to have a better background of their classroom goals to better assist them in improving their literacy skills. We talked briefly about the idea, and she sounded excited. We will have to see if it is feasible or not, but I will be excited if it works out!
SOCIAL STUDIES
Our state's social studies standards has one set for 6th-8th grade. They have sample curriculum maps to give an idea of what should be taught for each grade level. The science standards are similar, and my partner teacher and I talked about having three separate years of curriculum to rotate so that they are exposed to all of the content by the end of their three years, rather than doing the traditional 6th, 7th, 8th set-up. This way next year my 6th and 7th graders would both be doing the recommended content for 7th grade. My units will be created keeping ideas from Freeman and Freeman and the SIOP model in mind to support my language learners.
I also want to incorporate regular current events. I have been following the conversation about the topic via Stenhouse facilitated by Kelly Gallagher and Sarah Cooper. I already read Readicide to get ideas about Gallagher's Article of the Week and I want to read Cooper's book for further thoughts on the topic.
HOMEWORK
I haven't talked to my partner teacher about homework load yet. It has always been an expectation at our school to have a half an hour/night reading log requirement. I just saw Stacey's idea of a nightly idea notebook entry. I may have these two pieces be my regular homework. I do not plan on having social studies homework, unless students do not finish certain assignments in the time allotted in the classroom. This way students always know what their homework is, and they will be spending their time on valuable literacy activities.
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