Middle School Week 2

           With the second week finished in Middle School, I feel I am getting a little bit more comfortable in there. I have gotten a few more students to open up and even led a seventh grade class in a close reading, which I only had about 15 minutes to prepare for. But, it went excellently and I hope to do more things like this with the classes and continue to get my feet wet.

            So to break down my week a little by grade. The eighth grade spent all week working on a common assessment that had them reading two articles about high school football and broke them down in exercises that involved summary and evidence. They then had to write an argument essay on whether or not schools should financially support athletics. I was able to walk around and see students writing techniques, abilities, and their reading/annotating skills. These were all very varied and made me begin to think of ways to scaffold writing instruction without forgetting the advanced students and not leaving the lower performing ones behind. I also got to answer some questions about formatting posed from the students, which is always a great feeling.

The Seventh grade was a bit more interactive for me. They were working on a story titled “The Scholarship Jacket” which posed a duality of fair versus unfair involving race and socioeconomic status. My cooperating teacher started her classes off first with a vocab sheet where a sentence from the story was presented with a word underlined. The class went through the sentences together and wrote down what they thought the meaning of the word was. They were then asked to go into the glossary of their book and write down the real definition. Then they shared as a class what they had originally thought and what the real definition was.

For the next part the teacher gave a little summary of the short story then started reading the story and asking questions after certain paragraphs to check for understanding. The next day in class, my teacher asked if I would be interested in leading the close reading and if I could assign an entrance slip. So when the class came in, to activate prior knowledge, I asked the class if they could please write down three things they remember so far from the story on the entrance slip. After I collected them, I asked them to tell the class some of the things that they remembered. We then started reading as a class, and I stopped at certain places to clarify some information by asking the students questions, and I also had students make predictions. When the story was finished, the teacher had the students answer some questions that came after the story and we examined a poem that connected to the story.

This was definitely a great week and I had a lot of fun leading class. I am looking forward to the upcoming week and doing more in class with the students!