Ellis English Blog: Week 5 Update

Families,

Here's the latest from 7th grade English and Social Studies!

English
This week we had our first-ever Pop-Up Debate and I am proud to say that every student participated! The public speaking "moves" that we worked on were:

Making an arguable claim
Supporting the claim with evidence
Speaking in a clear voice at a volume appropriate for the space and occasion
Practicing SLANT when other classmates were speaking

Our next debate will be on September 14 and we continue to hone the above skills as well as start to practice the skill of responding to a classmate, whether to agree or disagree.

We also began exploring Signposts for reading fiction - patterns that all authors use that make us tstop while we are reading and ask ourselves questions about why an author might be making a certain choice. This week we covered Again & Again, Words of the Wiser, Memory Moment, and Tough Questions. Next week we will finish up with Contrasts & Contradictions and the Aha Moment. These signposts will give students a common language to use when discussing poetry, short stories, and independent reading books, as well as our upcoming class novel The Giver by Lois Lowry.

Social Studies

This week in Social Studies, students completed the Unit 1 Assessment. This assessment asked students to pick one topic from our Unit 1 study of life in medieval Europe and write about the three most important ideas from that topic. I was really impressed with how well students used class time and how many Explorers were able to turn in their work on time today. Next week we will begin Unit 2 which is about Ancient Islam.

Other Important Stuff

My WELL Office Hours are from 12:30-1:15 on Wednesdays. If your student needs to attend the WELL for help with Humanities work, please have them fill out this form prior to attending. If your student needs help with math or science, they need to arrange that with their math or science teacher(s).

Scholastic Book Orders are due at the end of the month. Please see this post for more information about ordering from Scholastic and helping us get more books for our classroom library.