Wow!  What a week this has been.  Things have been moving very quickly, and suddenly we find ourselves out of school through April 12th, a full month away from school.  The impact of COVID-19 is unprecedented, and as a result, we are all in uncharted territory.  Let me reassure students and families that our district administrators and staff are working diligently to think through the best ways to support our Grandville families in a variety of ways during this state of emergency.   

During our time away from school, we have an opportunity to reconnect with our families and take care of ourselves and one another.  For those that are interested, I created the self-care challenge below.  Feel free to make a copy of this document for yourself so that you can highlight each of the challenges that you complete.  Use the comment box below to tell us how your self-care challenges are going!

It feels like just yesterday we were kicking off the new school year, and now we are already in the home stretch.  With just one quarter left to go, this is the time of year when both students and teachers can feel the added pressure of the last couple months of the school year.  To help alleviate some of that pressure, I wanted to take a moment to remind students and parents of some of the resources available to you.

First, know that you can always find more information about what we are working on in our class linked to this website and posted to our Google Classroom space.  Our daily agenda slideshow, posted on our "Class Links" page, not only lists our in class activities for each day but also includes hyperlinks to any work that needs to be completed outside of our class. Students will also find this on our weekly schedule which is printed and given to students each Monday. We organize all of the work for our class using Google Classroom.  All assignments are also turned in via this space.  Use the "Classwork" tab in Google Classroom to easily locate everything we have been working on.

When it comes to needing extra help in particular areas, there are a few online resources that can support your learning.  For extra help with grammar and writing, make sure you check out some of the resources that we have been using in class:

• Noredink.com offers practice activities and quizzes over grammar concepts we have learned in class.
• KhanAcademy also has a section on writing and grammar that directly connects to your CollegeBoard PSAT account to help you give more individualized practice activities.
• Interested in growing your vocabulary skills? Check out Vocabulary.com and start an account using your school Google account.
• You can also use the HemingwayApp and Grammarly (already loaded onto your school Chromebook) to get feedback on your writing during the drafting process.

When it comes to extra support with close reading skills, perhaps one of the best tools at students' disposal is our Seminar time.  Each Wednesday, students have an hour in the middle of our day to meet with teachers in the courses where they may need some extra support.  Fortunately, we are able to connect our ninth and tenth grade students with upperclass tutors interested in the helping those students who wish to grow their close reading skills.  All students need to do is sign up on our Seminar request sheet which hangs near the door in 217.
 
We have all sorts of support in our building available to our students.  If there is something that you need or a resource that you are wondering about, don't hesitate to ask! 

   

I think March is my favorite month.  Yes, we welcome back spring, but even better is the fact that March = National Reading Month!  In celebration, we host a March Book Madness voting bracket in our high school library!  

In February we surveyed our students and staff, asking them what their favorite reads of the past year have been.  This year we had over 100 recommendations.  We organized the most popular recommendations into our March Book Madness bracket, and each day students have the opportunity to vote for a new book pairing in our library.  And, here's the best part, our voting students are entered into a daily drawing to win a signed copy of a book!

So far we have given away signed copies of Christopher Paolini's Eragon, Amanda Lovelace's The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One, Veronica Roth's The End and Other Beginnings, Brittney Morris's Slay, and Angie Thomas's The Hate U Give.  And we have so much more to give away this month, including books by John Green, Jennifer Niven, Tiffany Schmidt, and more! Students can vote each day to win!

You can follow along each day in March as we announce our winners using #BulldogsRead on Twitter. We look forward to seeing you in our GHS library throughout the month!

Hopefully your new year is off to a wonderful start.  I wanted to take a moment to update you about our upcoming units of study in our 9th grade Composition through Literature course and share with you where you can find some of the resources to stay connected with our class. 
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We have just kicked off our Poetry unit this past week.  Our class will be reading, analyzing, and writing of a variety poems.  Free verse and blank verse, blackout poems and haiku, odes and sonnets - we'll be using a variety of formats as mentors for our own creations. We will have an opportunity to hear from poets coming into our class to share spoken word poems and talk with us about publication.  Students will have an opportunity to publish their poems on their online portfolios as well as submit their work for publication outside of our school if they are interested. 

Our poetry unit will lead into our study of the epic poem of The Odyssey.  We'll be discussing the hero's journey and making connections between our reading of this classic tale with our reading of modern hero's stories like The Hobbit, Percy Jackson, Star Wars, and the Hunger Games.  

Finally, we will wrap up our semester studying the American classic To Kill a Mockingbird. Not only will we analyze the characters of this story, but we'll discuss if this book should still be considered relevant today. How does this novel hold up in today's world?

We would love to invite you to read along with us!  You can find our daily agendas posted on our the "Class Links" tab of this website. If you have an interest in reading along with us, discussing these texts with us either virtually or in person, we would love for you to join us!  We'll be utilizing some online discussion spaces this semester that will open up opportunities to connect with other readers, and we'd love to include you!  More information will be posted on this class website throughout the semester.

Our new year is off to a great start, and we're looking forward to connecting with you soon!

It's my favorite time in the semester...RESEARCH TIME!

This year our freshmen are connecting their semester-end research unit in our English class with what they are learning in their Biology course!  Students are studying the human impact on specific ecosystems in Biology, and in our class, students will be selecting an issue currently affecting our environment that they would like to do something about.  Students are able to use their research across our two courses in order to extend their learning. Coincidentally, as both the English and Biology classes begin work on this project, the United Nations Climate Change Summit is happening in Madrid. This means that our students should be hearing all about their research topics as our local and national media outlets cover the Summit over the course of this week and next.  

But we're not just going to be looking up information and writing about it.  No!  Instead, students are hoping to connect with experts and organizations working to make change in the areas of our selected topics.  This is where you can lend us a hand.

If you are someone (or know someone) doing work in any of the fields below that wouldn't mind my students emailing a few questions, please add your name and contact information below (or access the spreadsheet here).  We would love your help learning as much as we can about our selected topics. 

I'm not going to lie, I have issues with Romeo and Juliet.

In our ninth grade Composition through Literature class, we've spent the last few weeks wading into Shakespeare's language.  We've split our classroom into families with a taped line dividing our room in to the Montague and Capulet sides.  We've performed original skits utilizing Shakespearean language, and we share daily Shakespearean greetings.

But now that we have finished reading the first Act and are nearly complete with the second Act, we're beginning to question why are we reading this play.  Yes, Shakespeare's language and syntax can be challenging for students, but that's not what has us perplexed.  So far we've seen Romeo cry over not being able to be with the beautiful Rosaline and move on to the beautiful Juliet, watched Juliet's kinsmen threaten assault on the Montague women, learned that Juliet's mom is about 25 and wants to marry off 13-year-old Juliet to an older man, gasped as Juliet repeatedly kisses a stranger and then pledges to marry him within a couple of hours - well, we are scandalized!  Then today, as we were writing letters to Juliet, (yes, you can write a letter for advice to the Secretaries of Juliet in Verona, Italy), we learned that it is considered good luck to rub the chest of Juliet's bronze statue that stands outside her home in Verona.  This is too much!  Why are we still reading this play?!

And actually, we'll be getting to this very question in our study of the play in our coming class periods. Many students come to class thinking that Romeo and Juliet is a story of romance and triumph.  There is this mythology surrounding the story of Romeo and Juliet. Taylor Swift has a few songs about it. But it is certainly not an instruction manual for love.  It is time to disrupt Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet! It is tale filled with abuse of power, negligence, violence, toxic masculinity, and misogyny. What do we do with that?

In our class, we'll be talking about these issues.  How does the violence that begins with the parents in this tale impact the children? Romeo and Juliet are children, only 16 and 13, are they able to make informed, mature decisions? What do the adults in their lives do to support or undermine their growth?  In what ways do the male characters objectify female characters in the play? What impact does this have on who has power and who does not? Whose story is centered in the actions of this play? Whose voices are pushed to the margins? Why?

Reread those questions.  Perhaps this is what makes Romeo and Juliet relevant today.  We are still grappling with many of this issues in our world today.  So rather than focus on the romance between these star-crossed lovers, let's discuss how the issues presented in the play are still important to be discussing and connecting to our world today.

In the coming weeks, we'll be sharing some of our thinking and discussion using digital tools.  We would love for you to join us virtually as we discuss some of the major issues presented in the play. Watch this space for more information!

Fridays are our reading days.  It's my favorite day of the week.  This past Friday, as the temperatures dipped and snow swirled, we declared it our first "Snuggle Up and Read Day."  We had hot water so we could mix up some hot cocoa, cookies to dunk, and we found a comfy place in the room to record our reading goals for the coming week and spend the class hour reading.  

We begin the class hour each Friday by adding up the number of pages that had read in the past week and added it to our weekly reading log.  Students can select any style of text to read - realistic fiction, poetry, self-help, memoir, graphic novels, dystopian.  At the close of each month, we reward students who have met or exceeded their weekly reading goals each week during the month (thank you, Herb and Fire Pizzeria). After eight weeks time, we break our weekly routine to share our books and learn about more potential books that we add to our "To Read" lists.  Finally, we end each Friday class hour with "First Page Fridays."

What is "First Page Friday"?  As students wrap up their Friday reading time, I share with them a little about a book that I have enjoyed.  I briefly introduce the author and a summary of the story, and then I read students the first page of the book.  In a few short weeks, my students will take over and begin to share their favorite books.

This week I shared Laurie Halse Anderson's nonfiction poetry book titled Shout. Many of my students have read one of her early books, Speak. Shout, intentionally titled to follow in the footsteps of Speak, focuses on Anderson's early struggles with silence and her journey to find and use the power of her voice.  It is a devastatingly beautiful text, one I was excited to share with students.  And, to add to the excitement, I also got to share with students that our school will host a visit with the author come spring!  At the close of the day, I was able to give away a copy of the book to a student in each of my classes (thank you for making this possible, FirstBooks).  And to top it all off,  we heard from Ms. Anderson on Friday!  I posted a picture on our class Instagram site of our cozy reading day activities alongside page from Shout about "hygge", the Danish idea of comfort and connection.  The author took a moment to write us a "comforting" reply.  Very cool!   
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It is our revision and reflection week.  Students in all of Ms. Ward's classes are taking a moment to pause before we write our next essay, delve into our next book, to reflect on the work that we've done so far this semester.  Specifically, students are reflecting and revising their first summative essays.  They have received feedback from a partner during peer editing, they have self revised, and they have received feedback from the teacher.  Based on all that feedback, we need to go back and look at our initial goals. We need to make changes based on the feedback we've received.  What did we want to improve upon? What did we do to ensure our learning and success? And perhaps most importantly, we ask ourselves what we will do differently next time.  

Students have this week to make any additions and revisions to their Unit 1 essay.  We want to see students continuing to reflect on and grow in their writing skills.  Whatever revisions (not just edits) students make on their Unit 1 essay will improve their grade.  There is no penalty for revising!  We want to improve the quality of our writing and create goals for improvement that we can measure.

What will I do differently in my next writing assignment to ensure success?

We've been busy in our ninth grade Composition Through Literature classes.  We've been reading and writing up a storm, and now it is time to share what we've been working on!  If you mouse over the images below, you will find links to our online portfolios.  They are a work in progress, but we've gotten a good start.  We'll be adding to these sites throughout our year together.