5.1. "The Girl Who Changed Pakistan"

I was struck, probably like many Americans, by this story last week and thought about how far it was from my daily life, which alone made me want to read more about it. Anyway, click here for the reading, "The Girl Who Changed Pakistan," from Newsweek.

RI2./RHST2. Mathematics-Language Arts Interdisciplinary Reading

So . . .
As you have probably noticed, we're trying hard to incorporate reading and writing exercises into all of our classes. Well, we've always done that, but we are trying to communicate and use technology to make those reading and writing experiences more rewarding and useful to the students.
Click here to get to the reading about the benefits of studying math.

Language Arts-Social Studies Activity

This week's current event is taking a quick break from the Presidential campaign to talk about a news story that we thought might be interesting to our middle schoolers.

We're going to write less this week that normally for a current event - instead of the Chain of Main Ideas, we're going to write two central ideas, aka WHO+WHAT+WHY sentences. If you don't know how to write one, there are directions to help you below.

1. Read the informational article here and write a WHO+WHAT+WHY sentence that expresses the central idea of the article.

2. Read this second nonfiction piece on the same topic - how is it different from the first one? How is the author's purpose different? How does that affect what's is in the article? Write a WHO+WHAT+WHY sentence for this one, too.

When you are done, you will have read two articles and have written two (longish) sentences.

Things to Think about/That We May Discuss
Think about these issues - you DON'T need to write or type answers to them.

- You know the difference between facts and opinions. Notice that one of these pieces contains the author's opinions and one does not. Why do you think that is?

- Notice that when writing the directions, I used two different terms to name the readings - one is called an "article" and one is not. What accounts for this?

- This article is about France - so what does it have to do with us? Why care about topics that are concerned with French schoolchildren? Why care?

- Notice that the second article adds something as a "Bonus" meaning that the author didn't think that she wanted to simply make it another paragraph. Why do you feel that she labeled this part "Bonus"?

6.1. RHST2./RHST6. Week of Respect Readings

We found all these readings for our assignments on this website, Teens Against Bullying, which has a good deal of other interesting information on it and looks pretty, too.

Tuesday (RHST2.)
"A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly" This is a news article from The New York Times, which is considered by many to be the most important daily newspaper in America (even the world).

For this reading, we can practice the "Chain of Main Ideas" summary (click the link if you need directions) - remember that the main idea of each paragraph is the (WHO+WHAT) - "Who is the person or group that we're talking about and what is happening to them/with text?"

Wednesday (RHST1.)
"The Bully and the Bystander" This reading is from a website that is designed to teach parents, kids, and teachers important information.

For this reading, we are going to practice learning to read "textbook text." We're learning outlining in Social Studies, which is the best/easiest way to learn what you need from this kind of text, so make an outline of the argument.

Thursday (RHST2.)
"Telling Bullies to Think Pink" This is a more personal essay written by a news reporter - which is different from saying that it's news.

For this reading, we'll write a single sentence that determines the central idea (WHO+WHAT+WHY).