Reply to 6th grade benchmark advance

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Different teacher here.  My kids and colleagues hate Benchmark.  Fiction reading selections are single chapters from books, not whole books.  No time for book clubs is allotted.  No time for read aloud, which, believe it or not, many 6th graders enjoy.  Poetry is thrown in here and there seemingly randomly, and some of the poems are not appropriate for 6th grade. Nonfiction selections are frequently not interesting.  Yes, the kids are writing frequently, but [b]there's no passion there - it's robotically answering the prompts which are not of interest to the students or teachers. [/b] How many times are we going to compare and contrast two nonfiction or fiction selections that are just excerpts?  Ugh.  Where is the creative writing?  Why isn't there balance in the types of writing covered?

Also, it's a LOT of work for teachers to prepare the lessons.  It's supposed to be done for you but it's not. So much is left out.  For example, when doing the government research paper, Benchmark gave VERY little guidance on how to research and what tools to use.  Just basically said, "Do research. Go."
 Teachers had to supplement and create their own guidelines and scaffolds.  And the writing rubrics are not adequate - teachers need to rewrite them.

As far as grammar is concerned, it's not systematic, but randomly thrown in here and there, with a lot of emphasis in the first half of the year on pronouns.  Nothing so far about sentence structure - run-ons and fragments, which are an issue with a lot of 6th grade writers. [/quote]

Yep. This is exactly what we are seeing too. The students we have spoken to all hate it. [/quote]

That's how you learn to write.  First, robotically answer prompts.

This is the way you learn painting, for example.  First robotically copy another work.  Then, once you have the basic skills down, you move on to your own work.[/quote]

I agree with you about learning to write.  The problem is that the topics are generally not of interest to the students (or to me - which makes it a chore to read over and grade).  Ideally I'd like them to write about something they feel passionate about, or at least are interested in.  I'd also like to see a variety in the types of writing they're expected to do.  BTW, I've found that my best writers tend to be voracious readers.  Reading a single chapter from a book is not adequate.  I really dislike Benchmark.
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If they are voracious reader, they are checking books out from the library and reading well beyond benchmark and that was always the case. For those students who never read, I actually think they’re reading more now with benchmark than prior.[/quote]

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