Brighton Area Schools Workshop Statement:
Language Arts instruction in Brighton Area Schools classrooms is a workshop based model. This is a purposeful framework that is authentic to real-world learning. Workshop is a dynamic best practice model for reading and writing that guides teachers and students toward not just skill mastery, but deeper thinking and application of learning.
● Workshop is motivated by purposeful choice, which promotes engagement and builds independence, resulting in increased stamina. ● Learners are engaged through conversation and develop the ability to form and express thoughts that are evidence based. ● Focused teacher observations allow for formative and authentic assessments. These assessments lead to instructional differentiation. The workshop teaching practice maximizes student growth.
Language Arts instruction in Brighton Area Schools classrooms is a workshop based model. This is a purposeful framework that is authentic to real-world learning. Workshop is a dynamic best practice model for reading and writing that guides teachers and students toward not just skill mastery, but deeper thinking and application of learning.
● Workshop is motivated by purposeful choice, which promotes engagement and builds independence, resulting in increased stamina. ● Learners are engaged through conversation and develop the ability to form and express thoughts that are evidence based. ● Focused teacher observations allow for formative and authentic assessments. These assessments lead to instructional differentiation. The workshop teaching practice maximizes student growth.
THIS YEAR IN READING:
Your child's instruction will support the crucial transition children make from learning to read to reading to learn. Our opening unit, Building a Reading Life, launches your child into an upper elementary school reader. We will work on ramping up reading skills by immersing ourselves in within-reach fiction books while working on word solving, vocabulary development, envisionment, and prediction. The second unit, Reading to Learn: Grasping Main Ideas and Text Structures, addresses essential skills for reading expository nonfiction, such as ascertaining main ideas, recognizing text infrastructure, comparing texts, and thinking critically, as well as the skills for reading narrative nonfiction, such as determining importance by using knowledge of story structure. Our third unit, Character Studies, will lure us into fiction books, teaching us to closely observe characters, make predictions, and sharpen our skills in interpretation. The final unit, Research Clubs: Elephants, Penguins, and Frogs, Oh My!, shows youngsters how to turn to texts as their teachers. Children work in clubs to gather, synthesize, and organize information about animals, and then use this information to seek solutions to real-world problems.
THIS YEAR IN WRITING:
The third-grade units of study take into account that many third-graders are writing on full sheets of notebook paper and in writers notebooks for the first time. The opening unit, Crafting True Stories, extends students’ work with personal narrative while engaging them more fully in the complete writing process, with increasing emphasis on drafting and revising their work. In the second unit, The Art of Information Writing, youngsters write chapter books that synthesize a wide variety of information and learn to section their topics into subtopics. They are supported in this challenging work because they are writing about topics on which they have firsthand, personal knowledge: dogs, soccer, gymnastics. Changing the World: Persuasive Speeches, Petitions, and Editorials rallies third-graders to use their newfound abilities to gather and organize information to persuade people about causes the children believe matter: stopping bullying, recycling, saving dogs at the SPCA. The final unit in third grade, Once Upon a Time: Adapting and Writing Fairy Tales, uses familiar fairy tales to explore techniques of fiction writing such as writing in scenes, employing an omniscient narrator to orient readers, using story structure to create tension, and crafting figurative language to convey mood.