Hi,
Several of you have asked what the sixth and eight graders are being
expected to master, so I went to the state website and copied it below.
I just object to the whole mess. Expecting me to teach commas, for example,
in one year is ridiculous. It's one of the most complex decisions a writer
makes. I've spent the entire year trying to show my kids that language comes
in chunks that we can move around to improve meaning. To do that we've
looked a prepositional phrases, verbals, appositives, participial phrases,
infinitives, etc., but it was all with an eye towards improving their writing.
We've written participle place poems, pronoun story books, and all manner of
projects around grammar; again, the emphasis has been on what these various
pieces do to our writing and meaning making.
One of the best days of the year came Thursday when we were looking at some
sentence imitating from a sentence combining book I have, and one of my kids
called out, "Hey, Mrs. Le, look up there. He started the sentence with a
participial phrase to make us see the action he was doing! Just like us
yesterday." We another had a great discussion about how moving the participial phrase
around changed the sentence and the meaning the reader got from it.
Now I'm being presented with this disconnected and seemingly random list of
things that I'm responsible for, and I'm at a loss. How much time do I spend
dragging them through parts of speech so that each and every one of them
"knows" the parts of speech. (How many discussions here on the list are about
the function of a word and how we'd classify it? How much is enough for
seventh grade?) What do I leave out to make time to do that? I have no problem
teaching participles and infinitives (I just finished a section on those), but
is that all?
I'm back to my basic gripe, though. If not this, then what? My school
wants to put up our benchmarks and standards on the website so that parents know
what we do. What do I give them instead of this mishmash?
Did I mention that I have a whole 1.5 hour meeting to thrash this out with
the sixth and seventh grader teachers?
~Gretchen
Sixth Grade:
Students write and speak with a command of standard English conventions
appropriate to this grade level.
Sentence Structure
1.1 Use simple, compound, and compound-complex sentences; use effective
coordination and subordination of ideas to express complete thoughts.
Grammar
1.2 Identify and properly use indefinite pronouns and present perfect, past
perfect, and future perfect verb tenses; ensure that verbs agree with
compound subjects.
Punctuation
1.3 Use colons after the salutation in business letters, semicolons to
connect independent clauses, and commas when linking two clauses with a
conjunction in compound sentences.
Eighth Grade:
Students write and speak with a command of standard English conventions
appropriate to this grade level.
Sentence Structure
1.1 Use correct and varied sentence types and sentence openings to present a
lively and effective personal style.
1.2 Identify and use parallelism, including similar grammatical forms, in
all written discourse to present items in a series and items juxtaposed for
emphasis.
1.3 Use subordination, coordination, apposition, and other devices to
indicate clearly the relationship between ideas.
Grammar
1.4 Edit written manuscripts to ensure that correct grammar is used.
Punctuation and Capitalization
1.5 Use correct punctuation and capitalization.
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