english 100

Welcome to Freshman English! 

Ninth grade is an important academic year not only because you’re starting high school with a clean slate, but also because this is the year that you’ll learn and apply new concepts and skills that will improve your reading and writing.

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What we’ll work on

This class will be all about building skills you’ve learned up through middle school but we’ll take them to the next levels – first making them high school accomplished and then college ready.

With writing, for example, we’ll spend time on how to back up an argument you’ve made with evidence. We’ll do some work with grammar so that your writing style – not just your ideas – will improve. In reading, we’ll work on engaging at a deeper level with texts in both academic and pleasure reading. 

This year, the major texts we will be studying are , Fahrenheit 451 (novel), the Odyssey (epic), and Romeo and Juliet (drama), and excerpts from Funny in Farsi and House on Mango Street.

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How we’ll work

It’s English, so we will be reading and writing - a lot! We’ll read everything from poems to novels to academic articles and just about everything in between.  We will writing about what we read, what we think, creatively and academically - we will do it all! We will hone our critical thinking skills and learn to appreciate and understand different points of view.

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I balance our use of technology and "old school" paper/pencil, so we will be reading, writing, and even listening and speaking with and without tech.

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In addition to reading and writing, we will be practicing "soft skills" that are essential in adult and career life: time management, organization, collaboration, listening, appropriate electronic communication, and management of electronics for productivity and creation of work products.  

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Materials

You will need a three subject notebook (for our interactive notebook, which will be your repository of skills and practice), as well as a separate folder with paper, sticky notes, and obviously pens and pencils. I also require that you bring highlighters (orange, yellow, green, pink, and blue), which will be used routinely during our writing instruction.  We will work some on our Chromebooks and some in our interactive notebooks. Students are expected to bring all required supplies to each class. Because we will be keeping interactive notebooks, bringing a roll of tape will be useful.