Readington Middle School

Welcome to the Language Arts Department home page for Readington Middle School!  We hope to provide parents, students, fellow educators, and community members with helpful information about the teaching and learning in Language Arts.  Click on a specific teacher's name for further information related to specific classrooms.

 

Overview:

In Language Arts the reading and writing units are closely intertwined, so that the reading work supports the writing work, and so that teachers may teach one major unit and one minor unit.  For example, in September teachers launch with a major writing unit, and a minor reading unit in September, and then move to a major reading unit, and a minor writing unit in October.  Our units of study are very specific with anchor texts, unit texts, and mentor texts.  In Readers and Writers Workshop our students read and write a lot!  Students will read shared texts, independent texts, and book club texts.  Students read in book clubs as often as possible so that students have reasons to talk and to compare their interpretations. They read books by well known authors such as Laurie Halse Anderson, Walter Dean Myers, Chris Crowe, Harper Lee, S.E. Hinton, Jim Murphy, Theodore Taylor, Sean Covey, and many others.  We pride ourselves in providing students with high-interest, engaging texts. In writing our students concentrate their learning through three main units; informational writing, opinion (essay) writing, and narrative writing.  Our students volume of writing steadily increases over time.  Writers in grades 6-8 will produce close to 25-30 pages in their notebook for each unit of study, plus several drafts.  Students learn techniques in writing through mini-lessons which rally around the big goals of the unit.  One of our foundations of writers workshop is that writers need mentors.  The richest way to teach is through mentorship.  Our students study closely the work of multiple mentors; Lois Lowry, Gail Carson Levine, Natalie Goldberg, Gary Soto, Patricia Polacco, Jon Scieszka, Gary Paulsen, and many others. 

 

Young people benefit from the invitations to read, write, and research just as people the world over read, write and research.  We teach our students that it is important to work hard.  People learn from their own hard work.  Expertise is developed through repeated practice, through a quantity of engaged hard work.  Learners of any skill need extensive opportunities using all they know and can do in order to pursue purposes they regard as important.