Hi Everyone! My name is Ariana and I am starting a brand new class in the middle school that I teach in for LLD students. It will be a self-contained class with up to 12 students in grades 6, 7, and 8. I will be responsible for teaching math, science, social studies, and language arts/reading. I have been working as an in class support and study skills teacher in 6th grade for the past 5 years and I really don't know where to start with beginning this new class! I need to develop the curriculums for each of the subject areas over the summer and I also need to figure out how to teach my math and reading/language arts lessons to a variety of levels. I have been given the freedom to choose any reading/language arts and math curriculums or programs that I want to for my kids, but I don't know much about these. I am looking into Momentum Math and ACCESS Math curriculums. Does anyone have experience with these programs? For my language arts curriculum I need something that is on a lower reading level but is high interest and age appropriate for middle school students. Any suggestions? I am also curious about how you may structure your class time. I know that I will have my students for an hour and 50 minutes in the morning and then in the afternoon for an hour and 50 minute block. How do you organize your language arts time especially to cover reading comprehension strategies, writing skills, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, etc. I am feeling very excited about starting this program, but I am overwhelmed! Any tips, suggestions, advice, etc would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you! Ari
I would definitely suggest looking into the CAFE menu by the sisters. It's part of their Daily 5 (but you don't need to do this in order to use CAFE). It gives you reading strategies to teach and allows you to use your own literature. I love shopping here for high interest low level books: http://www.highnoonbooks.com/index-hnb.tpl?cart=[cart] I'm not familiar with either math program, but you might also want to look at use small groups for math. I know that the sisters have a math daily 5 as well on their website which might give you some ideas for organizing your math block.
