Nasrin+S

 4.5.09 Ok, here is another revised version of my book club unit with all of the changes and suggestions from numerous teachers!

My unit plan explains each lesson in detail, but I'm going to attach the powerpoint for Monday's lesson, so it's a more detailed look at the actual mini-lesson and parts of the lesson...

3.30 Here is my revised book club unit:

====**Hello, my name is Nasrin Samadi. I teach sixth grade ELA at the Gavin Middle School. I am currently working at an "America's Choice" school where we loosely follow the C.O.R.E. curriculum. The last novel I taught was "House on Mango Street" by Sandra Cisneros. Students wrote an analytical essay tracking how the main character changed over time as a final product. ** ====


====**I have just started reading "So Far From the Bamboo Grove" by Yoko Kawashima Watkins with my students. This is going to be a thematic unit on courage. I am weaving in non-fiction articles to provide students background knowledge on the historical context of the novel, while teaching them the elements of a story and characterization. Students will focus on how the setting affects the main character's life. ** ====


====**These are the standards I will cover in this unit: ** ====


Hi Nasrin- Nice work on that assignment. I especially liked the essential questions you came up with. I think the questions are a great way to get us thinking about what we are actually doing with the students, but I must admit I had some trouble coming up with mine. Yours gave me a good reference for how else I can think about what I am doing with the kids and how I can help them access information. -Amanda

Hi Nasrin-This is a great unit! I'm really curious how it goes with the book club format. I find that getting meaningful discussion going at the M.S. level can be challenging. Did you think about grouping students differently and the benefits/challenges of different groupings? I always find this so hard. I'm looking forward to hearing about how you teach "accountable talk" and "effective buzzing." -Sara

Hi Sara- Thanks for your comments! You've helped to figure out how I am supposed to post on here. I have found that grouping students by lexile is really important. The one year I didn't... I had very low-level readers with a challenging book, and they constantly acted out, brought down the group... did anything to be kicked out of class. My mentor told me I should try to give them books on tape so they can listen to it... I think you can mix high-level kids with them, but it gets frustrating for them and they can really challenge themselves with a higher-lexiled book if given the opportunity. I am very aware that most of the time, things seemed to be geared towards struggling students and that my high students are always bored and not challenged enough. I want to give them a chance to read something that the whole-class could not handle.

Buzzing-- we do a lot of talking about what a good book club/ group work sounds like and looks like.. agree on norms that I kind of guide with a preconceived list. We talk about the difference between "noise" and "being on task" and we can compare it to bumble bees buzzing...

Here is another updated version that has the third page of the UBD assignment posted. I still do not understand how to fill out page 4 and 5.

Here are 2 rubrics for assessing my performance tasks:

1) Rubric for the Analytical Essay

2) Rubrics for the Different Group Projects

Here is my WHERETO calendar: