Dear Students and Parents: here you will find an updated version of weekly and long-term assignments for Don Weedmark's students:
Pers. 2/3 Seminar Sixth Grade English/Humanities
Per. 4 Sixth Grade English/Humanities
Pers. 6/7 GATE Cluster English/Humanities.
Please read all assignment instructions carefully. Be thorough and creative. Parents: please read and sign all rubrics indicating your awareness of projects.

Fourth Unit: Author Study.
Guiding Question: Why does a person become a writer? What influences a person to write and publish books? (How does a writer's life and times influence her writing, her subject matter, the genre of her writing?) How do writers influence others, especially other artists, like other writers or musicians or painters, etc.? How do writers influence our culture?

This Unit of Inquiry is grounded in the reading that students are currently engaged in... reading books by a chosen author. Students have already written about their response to a book by this author in their RRJ's. Students should already have begun a second book by the author. The next RRJ is due Thursday, May 20, 2010. Soon, students will receive the Task Description and Rubric for the Author study assignment. Students will create a "literary magazine" about the writer. The magazine will feature four types of writing and be enhanced by various fillers, pictures, puzzles, factoids, and advertisements that all go together to celebrate the contribution to the literary world made by a chosen author. The four main parts of the magazine will be: a feature article/human interest piece about the author based on a timeline that answers the above questions; a book review of at least one of the books by the author that the student has read (the RRJ will help provide material for this and other parts of the magazine); a narrative written in the style of the author; and letters to the editor (that's the student) in which a fictitious writer is invented who does not understand something related to the novels the student has read by the author (the students answers and helps the letter writer solve the problem).

Dear Parents and Students!

Our last two weeks are upon us!

The last day to turned in missing work is listed in your individual class notes in Classjump. Our librarian has kindly allowed us to keep our class novel sets until we are finished with them (CHILDHOOD'S END, Pers. 2/3 and THE REMARKABLE JOURNEY OF PRINCE JEN, Pers. 6/7. Many students graciously allowed me to use their orange colored Prentice Hall Literature Books, TIMELESS VOICES, TIMELESS THEMES, in the classroom. Those students will take the books home on Thursday to clean them up a bit before we turn them in on Friday, June 11. Students will turn in all their text books (math, social studies, English, etc.) through their English classrooms… so have ALL your text books in your English class this Friday!

Standley Middle School
Don Weedmark