ELA 10: April 11-15

​Welcome back from spring break and welcome to crazy testing week! In case your student hasn’t shared this week’s schedule with you, here it is:

Monday:            Normal school day
Tuesday:           PSAT 10 testing + parent teacher conferences in the evening from 5-8pm
Wednesday:     late start in the morning; periods 1-3 beginning at 11am
Thursday:          Normal school day
Friday:                Half day; periods 4-6

Don’t worry; we have lots of important things we will do despite the crazy schedule!  

Monday will be dedicated to finishing up social norms speeches and refocusing on our final unit learning goal: argumentative writing.  Students will receive their practice essays back with three scores on them.  All of these are formative (practice!) scores only and are intended to help the students see where their skills are right now.  They received a score for their Focus, Organization, and Use of Evidence. All of these scores are recorded as 4/3/2/1 and checked as  “not graded” in MiStar.  We will look at a sample high scoring essay and students will compare their essays to the sample. What went well? Where do they need additional help?

Thursday we will continue our work with the essays and students will be working in small groups based on the skill level they demonstrated with the practice essay. Some students will be working on improving one or more of the three skills (focus, organization, or evidence) and some students will be working on pushing their writing to the next level with some additional challenges.

Friday students will take a second stab at the timed, argumentative essay. This essay score will count! If, prior to Friday, students feel like they need extra help, they are welcome to come see me for some extra feedback.  I will be available every day this week before school and Wednesday and Thursday after school. Students need to let me know they are coming in so that I can plan appropriately!

Hopefully I will see many of you Tuesday night at conferences! I encourage you to look over your student’s MiStar progress with your student prior to Tuesday. They should be able to give you a good idea of how they’ve been doing with practice work vs. assessments.  

Have a great week!