The school where I work is currently only a Primary School this year, but like most schools in Qatar, we are rapidly growing. Next year we will expand to offer lower level Secondary classes as well. Seeing that I will be teaching Year 7, 8, and 9 (read Grade 6,7,8 in the American system) English, I have been given the “opportunity” or is it “task” of creating a curriculum based on the National Strategies from the UK. Perhaps, curriculum is not the exact word, I need help finding content and material to supplement and help teach my curriculum.
While creating an absolute brand new curriculum and finding resources to make it successful from scratch has its appeal, it is a monstrous task for one person. That is why I am recruiting you to help me. I am hoping that the group brain, the network, or communal learning environment I am a part of will help where they can by: suggesting texts, readers, schemes, resources, and any other ideas that may prove to be useful.
I have created this wiki in hopes of making this a very simple process for the people who can help and spare some time. If the wiki proves difficult you can just leave me a comment on this post, email me, or send me a Tweet. I am sure everyone is beyond busy this time of year, despite this time crunch, however, I was hoping that you could take ten minutes to look over my document and fill in what you can.
Here are some sample questions:
- Which novels do you teach in 6th grade?
- What is the best writing program you have seen?
- Do you use an anthology or a grammar book? Why or why not? Which one?
You get the point. Any help will be greatly appreciated. If you are reading this post and you are not an English teacher, I would appreciate it if you could share the link with anyone in the English department of your school.
Thanks in advance Learning Network; let’s see what you got! If Web 2.0 is truly what we hype it up to be, let’s see how she runs when put to the test!
After reading many of the comments on this post, I have realized that I was only looking for content and not really thinking about curriculum, so I have begun thinking about essential questions and narrowing things down a bit on this page. Feel free to contribute in either space.
I have taken a look at your curriculum and I have noticed that it is highly Content based; have you considered moving your focus towards a Context based curriculum. As opposed to selecting texts to learn, why not choose a literacy competency to explore. From that competency you could empower your students to select or co-select the texts they feel best encompasses that competency. You have a unique opportunity to create a curriculum that moves away from the 19th Century ‘consumption curriculum’ and allows students to be part of the 21st Century ‘creation curriculum’ (the integration of Web2.0 is seamless if not essential). Check out the New Zealand Curriculum for a look at Context based Curriculum. Also Mark Treadwell has some good stuff on the pedagogy shift. I am currently teaching in school that allows and encourages a Context focus (albeit younger children this year) and the powerful learning that takes place is just inspiring 🙂
Thanks so much for your guidance. I agree with you that a context based approach makes more sense, but seeing that we are starting from scratch and have very little time, I would like to have a few texts in place while I find my footing.
Perhaps I could work with a hybrid model for the first year and see how that works out. Perhaps using the word curriculum was dishonest, I am simply looking for help in selecting content to begin building a program based on the National Standards from the UK.
I will start exploring the NZ curriculum, why is it that you Kiwis are always years ahead of the rest of us.
I’ll just answer one of your questions now (maybe I’ll get to some more later) – I haven’t yet seen an anthology for Middle-School language arts that I’ve liked… The ones I’ve seen were all American, and I felt like they were put together primarily in an attempt to include a story about every imaginable ethnic group in the US, rather than because the writing selections were interesting or good. (That probably sounds racist or something, but I just mean that anthology-makers inevitably try to please everybody and offend no one, and so they always wind up with a certain percentage of absolutely mediocre inclusions)
Then there always seem to be stories about baseball for some reason, and that’s even less interesting to my students. I think rather than use an anthology I’d personally rather concentrate on really analyzing and getting inspired by a few exceptional novellas or plays like the ones you’ve already listed.
That said, it can be nice to have anthologies as a backup to get some reading material from when you have a lesson or two to kill…
I’m not a teacher so I can’t help very much with the curriculum, but I’d like to give this advice – or perhaps plea. When students read certain books, or have a certain homework assignment, or do a certain task in class, there is usually an ulterior motive. There are units, and organization, and a specified order, and there is logic behind what is being taught and how it is being taught. But most of the time, students don’t know what this is.
So here’s my plea: make the information available. Let students know why they’re learning something, and how it all fits in with the big picture. This is something that I personally miss in almost all my classes, especially when it comes to review.
I also think you should set a up a way for reading and watching movies that could possibly lead to social interaction between students outside of class. As in books you recommend they read or make readily available, with an optional or bonus assignment attached, or movie nights that are optional to attend but, while showing interesting films, relate to the topic at hand. Also I think debates are a great way for people to find their voice, and organizing these in such a way that people (kids) participate without being forced to is especially important.
I realize I’ve gone off tangentially in relation to the curriculum, but I hope it comes in useful somehow.
A final note of advice – sometimes it is especially useful to give people a choice of books to read and write a commentary on, for maybe one unit. The more freedom students get at an early age, I believe, the more independence they develop later on. This was something one of my english teachers tried recently and it worked amazingly.
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Wow – I looked at the link to the strands – is that it? How beautifully simple. You’ve seen what’s on our atlas – almost 2 pages per grade level of s&bs…
Anyway…good books for grade 6:
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
* great for character study
* great for plot – there are 2 parallel plot because part of story is flashback
* great for figurative language
* great for introducing theme
+ there is a movie called “The Secret of Nimh”; it’s not a great movie, but it IS great for compare/contrast and analysis, etc. – great non-print text to use in conjunction with the novel.
Where the Red Fern Grows
(j/k – I know you hated that book)
The Conch Bearer
* multicultural perspective – fantasy aspect in India
* great story – adventure
* great for theme – raises idea of Indian laborers in the Gulf
* great imagery – a wonderful book
I’ll look in the cupboards about books – I know you’re doing British curriculum – a lot of the stories I am thinking of have American setting – not sure if you care or are interested in these – let me know
Writing program –
I have never used one other than as a RESOURCE….I’ve developed my own way of teaching writing. Writesource has a good curriculum you can draw from…the same company publishes a 6-traits curriculum box that has good stuff – lots of “examplars” (good and not-so-good) on overheads are included
I’m sorry, I’m not understanding anthology vs. grammar book. I thought anthology was collection of short stories – I think I have a limited definition because I don’t see how this stands in contrast to a grammar book. It seems from my students who come from the British system that whatever they use for grammar is good; they seem to know a lot.
I’ll add more if I think of any; hope this is of some help – sorry if it’s not.
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Hi Jabiz,
Looks like you are collecting quite a bit of content in your wiki. 🙂
I have to agree with what @marama28 said above — your curriculum so far looks content-based. However, building a curriculum from the bottom up is so difficult. MYP also advocates context-based curriculum (as does Canadian curriculum). However, I realize that most schools that are not MYP or do not have other such forward-thinking models to work with, and thus sometimes you are asked to “come up” with something very last minute, like you are.
My suggestion, in this situation — see if you can’t pick / choose some content and link them by theme or guiding idea. Come up with an essential unit question through which you will explore all the content, skills, and concepts. This will give your curriculum some depth and unity, and will make the links more obvious to your students, too — what I think @Anonym was getting at.
And @Alex – I have also seen very few MS Anthologies that provide “everything.” However, the American ones I’ve used have been quite good for me to dip in / out of, and I like that their content is usually (though not always) grouped by theme rather than genre. We use Elements of Literature and find it suits our purposes for several units or parts of units, though we are never using entire chunks of the anthology as the stand-alone unit. I find that these anthologies at least tend to be more holistically-focused than the UK anthologies, which to me are all skill-and-drill, or ask useless reading comprehension questions, rather than exploring The Big Ideas and higher-level thinking skills.
Good luck, Jabiz. It ain’t easy!
Hi, I’ll be teaching ICT alongside you next year. (My wife Pauline has mentioned you previously, I’m sure we have met sometime ago). I would love a tie-in between the subjects as much as possible. The outline I have already have for ICT is, in some areas, very close to yours.
You have: “What can we learn from different generations?”
I have: The Digital Divide: Generational – Using VOIP (e.g. Skype) to call grandparents/others to explore emerging technologies 2x generations ago.
Here I was particularly interested in developing the idea that the generational relationship is changing because our parents show us so little in terms of “cultural techniques”. My initial inspiration for this came from http://www.storycorps.org/
For me the student will have to learn about file formats/size/conversion/editing. I also hope to extend it so that they can include highlights of the conversation in a photo essay.
The theme of Social Justice would also tie in to my work on the ‘Digital Divide’. The issues I want to explore are; copyright, the control of information and social networks. Also I have entered the school into the next Qatar Model United Nations in late November. We could take the whole of Year 9 if they were interested. Our schools will be taking the role of delegates representing Columbia and Egypt. I need to teach research skills, resolution writing and public speaking.
I have asked for some ‘reading books’ to be added to the ICT order to help extend some students. I thought the ones below looked good.
Penguin Books worksheets for Level 6 reader
Bill Gates
http://plrcatalogue.pearson.com/Samples/9781405882590_FS_12_07.pdf
Story of the Internet
http://plrcatalogue.pearson.com/Samples/9781405882521_FS_12_07.pdf
I think you are ahead of me in blogging which is great because one of my priorities next year is to assess students in terms of “new ways of working and thinking”.
It would great if we could find time for team teaching-merging classes together to look at challenges that require colloboration. Lastly, I think all curricula/schemes of work come under pressure to include signposting to students about what skills they will be assessed on (particularly true of UK education) if this is built in beforehand then the temptation to test and rely only on data rather than judgement can be resisted, I hope this is clear.
Good luck
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