In Language Arts class, our first unit will be on grammar and paragraph writing (though we will work on these topics throughout the year).

I like to get a sense of what students remember from elementary school and where they are as writers now. We will start with writing a biography in which students interview a partner, write about that person and then introduce their new peer to the class. I use this time to get students to embrace collaboration and take new avenues with their reading, writing and risk-taking in a safe environment.

We will then move to reviewing the parts of speech, such as nouns, pronouns, verbs and adjectives. Students will have a grammar test following these few weeks of review.

Then, we will look at parts of a paragraph like the introduction, conclusion, transitions and body. Students will be guided through the process of writing a proper paragraph and we will work our way up to an essay as the student's final work to show what they learned about paragraph writing. This is truly the foundation for good writing in middle school and high school alike.

Also, students will become familiar with the school library and will check out books from there or my classroom. I love helping students find a book that they will enjoy. They will be introduced to our school wide reading program called Reading Counts in October.

Please revisit my webpage in the coming weeks as I will discuss our next unit that starts in October.