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.