October 3, 2022

What I'm Reading & Teaching in October

Classroom routines are falling into place. This month we'll begin our first whole class novel and continue building grammar skills through writing.

Over one month of school is now in the books. I feel good to be back in the classroom and a little more of my enthusiasm for teaching has returned. Overall, I have another good group of students, despite some high energy, chatty students in my last period class. I did think I would be doing a little less material creation this year, now that I'm fully working my way through my curriculum for a third time, but I'm finding that my students' skills are not as developed as they have been in years past and many more students need additional reinforcement of texts and skills. I am finally able to return to working with small groups, so rotations have made a big comeback in my classroom

Reading in October

I feel like I'm finally coming out of the reading slow down, I won't call it a slump, that I fell into at the end of summer and beginning of the school year. I read 8 books this month instead of last month's 6, which is my monthly goal to stay on track to read 104 books (2 books a week) for the year. Independent reading time in my classroom has helped, but many of my students don't have the reading stamina that students have had in year's past. I'm thinking about using reading sprints focused on skills to help students build up to reading for a full 10 minutes.

Classroom routines are falling into place. This month we'll begin our first whole class novel and continue building grammar skills through writing.

There's some carry over from my September TBR, but I at least started them in September! Here's what I'm hoping to read in October:
1. Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min (young adult fiction)
2. Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court by Kareem Abdul Jabbar (middle grade nonfiction)
3. Key Player by Kelly Yang (middle grade fiction)
4. Legend by Marie Lu (young adult dystopia)
5. Prodigy by Marie Lu (young adult dystopia)
6. Champion by Marie Lu (young adult dystopia)
7. The Diamond of Darkhold by Jeanne DuPrau (middle grade dystopia)
8. Rain Is Not My Indian Name by Cynthia L. Smith (middle grade fiction)

Classroom routines are falling into place. This month we'll begin our first whole class novel and continue building grammar skills through writing.


Teaching in October

Even better than coming out of a reading funk is having just about the next 2 months mapped out. Next week we'll kick off our novel unit for Pax by Sara Pennypacker and that will take us up to Thanksgiving break. I worked backwards to make sure I wouldn't end up grading over the break, since students wrap up the unit with an essay and project, and that is also when our trimester ends. That cushion also gives me time to catch up students who are behind.

We'll read Pax in about 4 and a half weeks with some reading done in class and some done independently. This is our first whole class novel so I try to ease students into following a reading calendar and reading every night. Students will continue to have 10 minutes of independent reading in class daily to start their reading and work on the sticky notes we use to track their reading. On the days that we aren't reading together in class, we do a Kahoot! review of the chapter students read the night before in class. Later in the year students have a choice of novels, so while they will still have time to read in class, we won't do any while class reading.

Throughout our reading of Pax, I review literary skills and elements we've already covered and introduce new ones, including citing text evidence, character traits, figurative language, allegory, irony, symbolism, and making connections. I utilize NearPod frequently and throughout our reading of Pax, I also rely heavily on close readings and paired readings. Access to water is an issue in the text and this year, I'd like to tie in nonfiction readings about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi. At the end of reading, students will write an essay focused on how the conflict helps to develop the theme, so another layer I'd like to add this year is to do some work toward developing a theme and identifying evidence in the text halfway through our reading rather than waiting until the end. You can find my resources for teaching Pax here, many of them adapted from this hyperdoc.

While reading Pax, I'll also continue to building my students grammar skills through writing. Right now we're working on what makes a simple sentence and today write on our two word sentence pieces in imitation of a spoken word piece titled, "Snow Fell." We'll do some revisions to the piece later in the week and then I'll have to decide what more I'd like students to do with it. This is the part of the year last year that I was out with Covid round one, so I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do with writing. After simple sentences, we'll move on to compound sentences. You can find all of my writing resources here.

Classroom routines are falling into place. This month we'll begin our first whole class novel and continue building grammar skills through writing.

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