This year I’ve been working at a charter school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn as a 6th grade reading teacher. For the most part I find it very challenging, but there are moments where I just sit back and take pride in the work that the students have done (that I helped them facilitate.)
I think it’s important to blog about your curriculum as a teacher. We are expected to do the EL (Expeditionary Learning) ELA 6th grade curriculum. The first unit of the year is Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Below I share how the unit went with my students, and I’m sharing the projects we did.
Here I link to a folder that has chapters of the book and the images that I included in a Do Now. These Do Nows were meant to get the students engaged in the lesson within a few minutes of class starting. Sometimes we would spend half of class going over these. (Not the plan…)
Near the end of the unit EL wants you to read three additional myth stories with the kids. I found the myths were rather difficult, so I modified the texts for the kids. I don’t remember what EL wanted us to do with the texts, but I had kids work in partners to read one of the three myths and then teach the class about their myth. Students had to write the main idea of the myth, define unfamiliar words, and connect their myth to a key element of mythology. This is a good project if you have students with access to Chromebooks. Packet can be found here.
“Hero Story”
EL has the students write their own hero story as the performance task for the unit. I created a Hero Story Packet and let the students write their story on the Chromebooks. This project gives students the opportunity to learn/practice working with a narrative story arch. When the students were done writing their stories they did a story share and walked around the classroom reading each other’s stories and leaving comments.
Boys leaving comments for each other on their work.
J Wilson 