“There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”

-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Welcome to 6th grade ELA at Hallsville Junior High School! We strongly believe that reading is the key to success, and we look forward to watching your children stretch their minds, question ideas, fall in love with new characters, and grow as readers and writers. Not only will we work hard to develop the analytical reading skills of our students, but we will also model a love of reading that we hope is contagious!

Curriculum

We start off our year by introducing dictionary skills. Sixth graders are allowed to use dictionaries on all assessments throughout the year (including STAAR), so it’s important that they learn how to use this valuable resource. During the course of the year, we will study various genres of text: nonfiction, fiction, poetry, life stories, and drama. We will also complete a research project before spring break. We will teach the students to look for big ideas, themes, and connections that the different things we read have in common. We will also introduce strategies to our students to use in enhancing reading comprehension.

We will emphasize vocabulary development this year. Each week the students will have either words or word parts (roots, prefixes, or suffixes) to learn. Quizzes will be given on Fridays. Try to use these words in conversation each week with your child!

Homework

We need our students to read at home! In fact, the most important thing a child can do to improve reading skills is to read! Because we believe it is vitally important for our students to read outside of the classroom, we will not require any additional homework the first semester. Each student will be asked to read 120 minutes over the course of a week and record this on a reading log. The reading log will be submitted each Friday. Students will also be asked to write about their outside reading each Friday. These reading responses will be graded. We would like to see students reading a variety of genres, and we also want to see students completing books.

Grades

We will give (at a minimum) three major grades per nine weeks. We will also give (at a minimum) one daily grade per week. Major grades are weighted at 60%, and daily grades are weighted at 40%. Students are allowed to retest once per nine weeks for full credit on major grades only. However, in order to retest, the student will be required to attend a tutorial. Tutorials are usually held outside of normal class time (before school, after school, or at lunch).

Please contact me with any questions!