My Teaching Journey: New Grade, New Challenges

This is the first time I've really written here about my professional life, choosing instead, to use this blog as a place to better develop my private interests and opinions. Like any tecaher, I bring these interests into the content and context of what I teach, this is present mostly in the texts and anecdotes I share with the kids. As I have been planning work with our first novel of the year, though, I am feeling like I want to share a little of what it is I'm doing in my classes.

For those who don't know (and that would be... uh... everyone!), I teach seventh grade Language Arts (LA) in a large school district just outside one of New York's largest cities. This is my first year teaching at the seventh grade level, having spent most of my career teaching grades 8 and up. It has taken me a few weeks to get used to the differences between seventh graders and eighth graders, a difference which becomes all the more apparent when you actually have to TEACH them. While eighth graders can tend to be a little more defiant, apathetic and "teen-like," seventh graders are more like "little kids," full of more wonder and naivte.

Langauge Arts, in my district, is intended to be taught in collaboration with a Social Studies teacher, as an informal Humanities program, of sorts. Since I am now teaching seventh grade, I attempt to align, either thematically or in content, the novels I am teaching with my colleague who is accountable for covering Early American History, specifically, the events that take place from Pre-American History to about 1830...

With that in mind, my students and I will be reading and working with the book Woodsong by Gary Paulsen. I had not read this book previously, but was familiar with Paulsen as a master of young adult literature, and had worked with his book Nightjohn last year in eighth grade.

Woodsong fits in with pre-American History thematically as it speaks to the relationships and community that can be developed not with people, but with nature, and in the case of the book, dogs. This is a common theme in a few of Gary's books, and one that my students have, after two days of background building, easily latched onto.

Now the fun begins!

Breathe in, breathe out... YOU AND I ARE ALIVE!