Audience & Goals

Audience

• Middle school students from public, private, or home school (6^th – 9^th grade)
• 9^th graders needing remediation can work out a special plan with the instructor based on student needs
• 7^th grade reading level preferred but not mandatory
• Any middle school student needing a challenging course of study in language arts (individual program development may be possible)

Goals

• Provide extended learning opportunities for middle school students.
• Provide a curriculum of choice so students can fulfill requirements in a way that is interesting and challenging to them individually.
• Provide an alternative for kids who are not able to work in the conventional classroom setting.
• Provide home school students an opportunity to do coursework aligned directly to state standards and benchmarks in a comfortable setting.
• Provide cost-effective language arts instruction to students needing alternative placement.

Objectives

• Use headings to locate where needed information is likely to be found.
• Understand and identify the order of events or a specific event from a sequence of events.
• Identify a statement or sentence that best indicates the main idea of the selection.
• Identify directly stated facts.
• Identify details such as key words, phrases, or sentences that explicitly state important characteristics, circumstances or similarities and differences in characters, times or places.
• Identify directly stated opinions.

Students will:

• Examine implicit relationships such as cause and effect, sequence-time, relationships, comparisons, classifications, and generalizations.
• Predict probable future outcomes or actions.
• Infer an author’s unstated meaning by drawing conclusions based on facts, events, images, patterns, or symbols in the text.
• Infer the main idea of a selection when it is not explicitly stated.
• Identify unstated reasons for actions or beliefs based on explicitly stated information.
• Draw conclusions about the author’s motivation or purpose for writing a passage or story based on evidence in the selection.
• Draw a conclusion that is validated by the evidence in the selection.
• Draw parallels between the selection and issues and situations relevant to the text.
• Identify characteristics of given passages.
• Distinguish between various literary forms.
• Judge how well literary elements contribute to the overall effectiveness of a selection.
• Identify and examine the development of themes in literary works.
• Identify literary devices and determine the purpose of their use.
• Identify how artists' stylistic decisions contribute to the impact of a selection.
• Identify clues to time periods and cultures represented.
• Provide a clear and easily identifiable purpose and main idea.
• Provide relevant supporting details and examples.
• Provide content and selected details that consider audience and purpose.
• Use resources, when appropriate, to provide support.
• Develop a recognizable beginning that conveys a clearly stated topic to the audience.
• Develop a clearly sequenced body that is easy to follow with accurate placement of supporting details.
• Develop a conclusion.
• Use transitional words or phrases that are clear.
• Construct simple sentences.
• Use complex sentences for a variety in sentence structure.
• Vary sentence lengths and beginnings.
• Create a natural sound that allows the reader to move easily through the piece.
• Correctly spell words appropriate to benchmark level.
• Show basic control of noun-pronoun and subject-verb agreement.
• Use a consistent verb tense.
• Use a consistent point of view.
• Use correct end-of-sentence punctuation.
• Correctly place dates in a series and in dates.
• Include internal punctuation such as commas, colons, or semi-colons.
• Use apostrophes in contractions and singular possessives.
• Use quotation marks where appropriate.
• Capitalize, including within quotation marks.
• Make paragraph breaks, including the use of dialogue.
• Include an alphabetical bibliography and in-text documentation that follows the assigned format rules.
• Acknowledge sources when paraphrasing information or quoting directly from sources.
• Include research that uses a minimum of two credible sources.
• Include research that uses a broad variety of materials and credible sources.
• Write in a variety of modes appropriate to audience and purpose.