As we reach the first trimester, students have been busy learning the routines of 7th grade core. In Language Arts students have learned different warm-up strategies including creating academic sentences, learning academic vocabulary, daily oral language, and unpacking dense text. Our objective has been to create strategies that will help the students strengthen their writing. These warm-ups are being revisited on a weekly basis. In addition to warm-ups, all students in the school have learned about outlining and color-coding their writing to help with organization. Our goal is that students will learn a formula for writing so this structure will be in place for the remainder of the year. We are now turning our focus on the next unit of writing, the Persuasive Essay. Students will be introduced to different persuasive prompts over the next two weeks in which they will create a five sentence paragraph. At the end of this period, the students will select one prompt and expand their five-sentence paragraph to a five-paragraph essay. This is modeled after the steps during the Step-Up to Writing unit the students learned from this past month.
Along with writing, students have been focusing on a Fiction unit of study for reading. The following short stories have been read: Seventh Grade by Gary Soto, Thank You M’am by Langston Hughes, and Zebra by Chaim Potak. The literary skills learned during this unit include analyzing setting, internal and external conflict, cause and effect, plot and theme. Students are currently finishing this unit by reviewing vocabulary from each story and creating vocabulary posters to share with other students. GATE students are currently analyzing a piece of text by Shakespeare, from The Tempest, in order to learn how to self-select vocabulary for their own vocabulary collections. Students will then select words to put on a word-wall within the classroom.
In addition to the above, I would like to point out that all students should have been reading a minimum of thirty minutes per night since the second week of school. Students have also been notified of their goals for Accelerated Reader points. This goal is based on a formula using their reading levels and reading time over the nine-week period. If students are reading independently and completing their novels, they can take tests on Accelerated Reader in the back of the classroom several times throughout the week. If you have any further questions, feel free to email me.
In Social Studies, students started with the Fall of Rome to learn about the rise of Christianity and have continued with Feudalism, the rise of the Church and daily life in Medieval Europe. Students were able to participate in a simulation on feudal systems where our guest attacker, no other than Viking “Ms. Rav”, came in to raid the manors. The unit on the rise of the church provided an opportunity for students to learn in depth about each chapter at different stations where they completed activities such as sculpting gargoyles, creating stained glass windows, learning different instruments and about the seven holy sacraments. As we complete the last sections of daily life, students in the GATE class are presenting short skits to support the topics they have learned in each section.
In closing, I would like to extend an invitation for you to peruse our class blog (see the Blogmeister link) in order to read and respond to student writing by GATE students. I would also like to share a poem written by one of the students as a conclusion activity during our unit on the rise of the church. The students were to come up with a kind of acrostic poem using “the church” and terms learned in the unit. They were to start with an illuminated letter and finish by illustrating it. Although I cannot re-create the drawings here, the writing was exemplary and I was compelled to share it with a larger audience. I hope you enjoy it.
hrown out of his position as a pope,
Gregory excommunicated Henry IV
Henry could no longer gain salvation,
So to Italy he fled to escape damnation
Holy days in a cathedral of Christ
Music and dancing just doesn’t suffice
Bonfires and jugglers, acrobatics and plays
The mummers’ act will stay with you for days
Education used to take place in a church
But rarer is a book for universities to search
Thomas Aquinas, a scholar of theology and philosophy
Bridged the gap of faith and reason with great logicality
Crusades to recover the holy land
Striving to conquer with a sword in hand
Pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome
Traveling on foot until they get home
Holy Orders to become a priest
The blessing of bread and wine, a Eucharist
Sacraments, or sacred rites
Give us peace of mind at night.
Usually formed in the shapes of hideous beasts
Gargoyles, used for rainspouts, at the very least
Gothic cathedrals, naves, and stained glass
Flying buttresses and crosses of brass
Ranks of the church, the pope at the head
Then the cardinals and archbishops instead
Then the bishops come in a mass
The lowly priests come in dead last
Convents and monasteries are a religious order
With nuns and monks whose life revolves around a cloister
They care for the poor; they care for the sick
And the eight church services a day are laid on thick
Hence my travels end,
And my blessing to you my friend
I have learnt the ways
Of the great church of today
-By A.L.