That exclamatory sentence can be taken a couple different ways - depending on your inclination. Well, regardless of whether you are anxiously anticipating the start or trying to hold on to the last few weeks of summer and sanity, school is in the back of all of our minds; specifically, the amount of work that awaits us between opening week and the first day with students.
I turned in my master's capstone a week ago, and then had to immediately attend a department meeting with our administrators. I had to creatively answer questions, since I seriously had not even thought about literature curriculum. Everyone else had their curriculum maps there and I ... well, I'm a great talker so...
I went home and started going through first week activities, and decided to reuse a few. I also found that I wanted to jazz several up to be a bit more engaging. This year, I want all of my ice breakers and first week activities to be focused on the content areas - no generic "find someone who..." activities this year. I plan to use the activities to assess basic skills that first week. Note the word "basic." I'm not trying to challenge to the point of tears before they even make it to the first Friday.
What I came up with is some pretty fun stuff that I think both my 6th and 8th graders will like. This is what I created:
There are 18 different activities: 3 "getting to know you" pages, 3 book pages, 1 story elements page, 1 figurative language activity, 1 parts of speech activity, and 9 writing activities. The writing activities include paragraph writing, summarizing, narrative writing, letters, personification, and a newspaper article assignment. I'm so excited to have my kids complete these this year. I will have the 6th grade lit classes complete a few, 6th grade English a few more, and the 8th graders will do a mix of everything. Week one: ✓, ✓, & ✓
Here are a few examples that I'm going to use to get the 6th graders started:
Fully aware they are Harry Potter themed. If you haven't figured out that I have an obsession yet, then I don't know what to tell you. Actually, I think HP is why I decided to teach literature. More on that another day, as I am going to need another whole post to show you what I've been up to in terms of HP. True love. Always. (You see what I did there?)
Anyway, I hope other teachers can find these useful. This set is already up and ready for download in my TPT store. Have a good night, everyone!
~L
Back to School ELA Activities
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