http://www.teacherplaces.com/leec/weblog/101.html

Well, we're back in the swing of things here in Orlando.  I've spent the last week doing team building and "get-to-know-you" activities, and now that the students' schedules have been corrected and adjusted, I'm ready to get us started on our books. 

I have 9th and 10th grade again this year, although unlike last year, this year three of my five classes are honors classes.  It's been fun to consider how I might do things differently with the honors class.

So, here's my plan for the beginning of the year.  I'm going to use Among the Hidden (Level 2) with the 9th graders.  It's so engaging and, while the reading level isn't incredibly challenging, there are really important concepts that we can discuss.  The one negative comment my students had last year was that I had them do too much 'stuff' while we were reading.  In retrospect, I agree with them.  There's so much to do and such good stuff in the teacher's guide, but it can be overwhelming for the students.  So, I'm going to try to focus on visualizing and vocabulary.  We'll do the "Vizualizing to find main idea" and "Visualizing reading by making connections."  We'll do one vocab word a day as a class and I'll ask students to find another word of their own to add to their notebooks.  We'll keep a word wall and develop and organization for the words we add to the wall.  We'll also use a few of the nonfiction pieces to begin practicing research skills like developing questions and noting facts.

Both of my 10th grade classes are honors classes.  We're beginning by doing The Hoopster (Level 3) as Book-in-a-Day.  This is actually an independent title, but I did this with the students last year and it went well.  Each student is responsible for a small part of the book.  They read, summarize, and note questions they have about what happened before and after their parts.  Then we go through the chapters and each person shares their information.

After The Hoopster we're going to begin Lay That Trumpet in Their Hands and then To Kill a Mockingbird.  We'll focus on tolerance and civil rights.  Then we'll move into a study of the Holocaust with Night .  Although this isn't a core novel in Level 3, we teach it to all 10th graders at our school.  There are several great nonfiction pieces in PITR that tie these two together nicely. 

That's my skeleton plan right now and I'll blog more details when we get going.