September 2009

9-2-09
• Put together a list of needs.
• Met in sub groups to compare standards at grade levels.
• Discussed what we have and what we need.
• In favor of a universal format for content standards in all subjects.
• Discussed number of novels taught at each grade level.
• Agreed in favor of a scope and sequence for standards.

9-3-09
• The junior high (7-8) needs to teach more novels.
• Goals today: What do students have to learn.
Abandonment - What are we teaching that we may not need to. Can we fit those to the standards.
• 9th grade and 6th grade get together and decide where the students are at when they enter 7th and what they need to know when they exit 9th.
• Sub groups get together and identify grade level standards and the sub topics covered.
• Vocabulary:
Introduce- skill is introduced
Taught (X)- skill is taught
Mastery- skill mastery expected of proficient
students
Sustain- review, revisit, and polish skill to
sustain and advance knowledge
• What do we do when we feel the standards are not high enough?
• There are several gaps in word usage for the elementary grades.
phonics, decoding, grammar
• Need to align novel reading list for k-12.
• The middle school (7-8) was given several novels and is working on a novel list.
• We will use the Co-op standards sheet as a starting point to put together our standards.

9-23-09
• We will use the district form and come up with an additional format that meets more specific needs.
• We have worked on k-4 language arts standards.
• We have a selection of several other standards to build off of.
• We would like to build a scope and sequence document for k-12. A.K.A. Quick and Dirty
• Vocabulary: Proficient rather than mastered
• High school broken major components to bring back first draft of curriculum for high school.
• K-2 has a lot with decoding that they are almost their own entity.
• We need a scope and sequence to know specific levels where we introduce, become proficient and then sustain.

September 23rd

English HPT:

I was hoping that this blog would be the go to place for the whole team, with only 6 of us even logged on, that dream may die. I suppose, though, a mass e-mail is actually easier. It looks like we have decided to meet in the high school library for the meeting. We will start the first ten minutes with a whole group meeting, and then branch off into our respective sub-groups. Since we are hosting, I suppose it is up to the high school team to bring the treats for this meeting. (I hope everyone likes store bought baked goods . . .)

The focus of this meeting should be to continue to find those parts of the curriculum that are either missing entirely or misplaced within the curriculum as it currently stands. By the end of this meeting I hope that we will have identified our problem areas, and set up groups that will be responsible for fixing those problems.

I have heard the concern about our group being large, and our project daunting, but I feel that the curriculum we have, while not perfect, is an excellent start and as the English Team we have more resources than most other teams from which to steal . . . err . . . borrow.

Looking forward to the 23rd!

Appleby

Hello

Welcome to English HPT 2009

While e-mail is an effective communication tool, I thought it would be wise to have a blog that could be accessed by each of us, or the administration as an archive of our work together.

If you have entered this blog from my invitation, you should be able to post and make comments. If you have never blogged before, play around a little, it's actually kind of fun. You can post websites, pictures, videos etc. that can benefit us all.