Denise LaRoque Hawk Clan  
Grade 6

djlaroque@seattleschools.org

Hawk Clan Syllabus

I am very pleased to be able to work with your middle schooler in Writing, Reading and Social Studies this year. I realize that all our students know how to write and read, so what I will be working on in literacy this year, is helping your child develop skills to write more effectively and creatively and develop ways to read critically and with good comprehension. During this school year, the literacy goals will be supplementing the Social Studies curriculum.

In Reading, students will study vocabulary that is integral to their social studies focus. They will be required to read non-fiction text on a weekly basis related to their Social Studies focus. Students will also read fictionalized text such as short stories, selected chapters from novels and complete novels related to Social Studies. This fall, they will be reading “Homeless Bird” by Gloria Whelan or “Shabanu” by Suzanne Fisher Staples.

We will also be reading selected books for Literature Circles, and other books of choice to be read at home that are not necessarily related to Social Studies. By November, each child will pick a book for inclusion into a Literature Circle. During their Literature Circle time, we will be having conversations about the book, discussing character actions and motivations, predicting what will happen next, identifying the causes and effects of character actions, figuring out themes and lessons, etc. The books will all be realistic fiction.

I hope that by the end of the year, your child will have read 12 books. This number can include books assigned in class, books they read at home and books I read aloud in class. While reading these books, we will develop strategies for active reading. Some of these strategies include listening to our inner voices as we read, referring to prior personal experience as we read, asking questions as we read, inferring meaning as we read, paraphrase meaning, moving from facts to ideas, etc.

The actual writing students do will be in two forms, social studies content and writer’s notebooks. Social studies content will mostly be done as homework and be in response to reading as well as what we talk about in class. This writing will be looked at mostly for content, though neatness is necessary and an effort needs to be made on conventions. Students will also produce larger written pieces (research, opinion pieces, book reports, etc.) at the end of each quarter that are related to their social studies content. Accurate conventions will be required.

We are implementing Writer’s Workshop using bound composition books that will become the students’ main tool to improve as a writer. Students will be writing in them during school and also for homework. The expectation is approximately 1 to 1˝ pages an entry. Larger writing projects will come out of this book. We will start the year writing personal narratives and essays. Later on in the year, we will be writing historical fiction, poetry, and biographies. At any time, your child can do what is called independent publishing. They can write their own genre of writing and follow through on their own ideas.

Our goal is to publish one to two pieces of writing a month, that is, pieces that are taken all the way through the writing process, from brainstorming to editing. The six trait writing model is what we will use to discuss the students’ writing as we evaluate what is produced for content, style, and process.

During World Cultures (6^th grade social studies), we will begin the year looking at world religions and spirituality. Religions and spirituality is also how we will be looking at mapping and geography. Students will be comparing and contrasting the philosophies, times, and stories of the different religions and spiritualities and studying the effect some of these cultures have on the United States of today.

Later on in the year, we will be focusing on several ancient empires of the Eastern hemisphere. We will be looking at their history, important people, life styles, geography and much more.