Welcome to 6th grade!!!

Welcome back to what will be another great year at Woodrow Wilson middle school!  We are excited to welcome two new language arts teachers, Mrs. Kerkman and Miss Hettrick.  Miss Gates is returning to Wilson, but has now joined the 6th grade team.  And finally, a familiar face in Mrs. Sawicki!  As we get the year underway, we'll spend time building an understanding of the structure of a workshop and building charts to anchor students understanding of how to work within this structure to be an independent reader and writer.  We'll also be setting up basic routines and expectations.  As we build this with students, we'll each be sharing a beloved novel so that students can practice working independently within the parts.  During the first part of the workshop (focus lesson) students will actively listen and think about how to apply the teacher's lesson, then they'll be given an opportunity to put into practice that new learning. Finally, we reconvene as a whole class to share our experience and learning so that we build shared meaning. We use this structure to learn about author's language, and what it means to be a reader and writer.  As the year progresses, we'd love to share each new genre we investigate, samples of text used to support student learning and examples of student work in their literature discussion groups, writer's, reader's and language workshop.  We'd love for you to bookmark our site and remember to visit and share your positive comments with us.