Reply to APS MS ELA curriculum and differentiation?

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Reply to "APS MS ELA curriculum and differentiation?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]APS does have intensified classes in middle school now, so there is some differentiation.  My 7th grader is in Intensified English.  The teacher said they read materials at a higher lexile level, do more analysis and write more than in the non-intensified class.  So far, in Q1, they did a short story unit and are now reading The Outsiders as a class.  That's the only whole class novel of the year, but they get to pick other books from a selection.  So yes they do read books and your kid can choose more challenging options, if that's their preference.

APS has emphasized writing and analysis in all intensified classes, so there should also be more writing in classes like history/civics and science, than in the non-intensified versions.  [b]In 6th grade Intensified History, for instance, my kid had to write a fictional narrative from the first person perspective of an immigrant and do research to support the details in their account.[/b][/quote]

I’m as liberal as they come and my spouse is an immigrant, but this feels like a poor use of an assignment. Do they at least say like an immigrant arriving in America in 1889 or  something like that? Or is it a contemporary immigrant?

As for novel reading, reading a novel as a class allows for deeper discussions, and the analysis that students submit can be more careful scrutinized by the teacher — it’s not like they are reading 150+ random novels to critique their writing assignments?!  My neighbors private told me they were assigned about 5 novels.

But obv the SOL and SAT are not having students read novels for the test, so the emphasis for APS is reading passages and responding to those. [/quote]

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