Treasure Chest of Thoughts

The more I learn…the less I know!  As I begin thinking about how to organize my classes for this fall, my brain literally begins to spin.

Writer’s Notebooks?  Grammar Time?  Lit. Circles?  Genres?   Multi-Genre?  Self-Selected Texts?  Vocabulary?  Frameworks?

Then there’s technology.

In the online book discussion of Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them, I do agree with this statement:

     I’ve made choices in my work in order to dedicate myself to the
     achievement of writing.  You will have to make choices, too. (pg.15)

Which choices are the right ones, though?  Not to belittle what I read in my “personal professional development,” but to remember that we…okay, I…bring seventeen years of experience to my classroom is also a definite positive. 

So here goes…

If I only taught a writing class, I would focus solely on writing techniques; likewise, if I taught some sort of reading survey class, I would choose the best reading stratigies.  But I do not.  I teach non-”special” classes.  I teach English 11 and Pre-AP English 10 (at least according to the last schecule I saw!); therefore, I am responsible to my state’s Framworks, which includes both writing and reading…and several other important strands.

Thus, I would like to begin a series of posts organized around the thematic multi-genre units that I will teach this fall.  Within these posts, I also hope to choose which strategies that I might use to best meet Frameworks and the various learning strategies within each class.

Thus…I want to continue to learn and then use the strategies with which I am most comfortable, for with those that I have the most passion, then the more my students will learn.  And the higher they will score on all their assessments!