ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS
A Passion for Literacy and Learning
Spend a day at M.S. 223 and you will find that our ELA department is a dynamic, fascinating place to learn. On any given day, you may walk into a 6th grade reading class where students are attentively listening and speaking about a read aloud their teacher is sharing. They may be asking each other questions about the characters and their actions and what they would have done if they were in their places. You would look around the room and see a classroom that is not unlike all of our classrooms: jam-packed with bins of books at multiple reading levels and of high interest to the children. Posters will show you clearly what strategies students have been learning and student work will be displayed all over the classroom. Students will have resources galore to do the very important work of learning and smiles will be rampant.
You might walk into another classroom where there are a group of ELA teachers in a labsite, watching a staff developer as she models best practices for teaching. Those same teachers will meet with their full time literacy coach and TC staff developer on this day, and they will reflect and plan based on their collaboration, ensuring that their teaching is both supporting and challenging all of their children.
You can then walk down the hall, admiring the colorful bulletin boards displaying published pieces of writing from all classes with student and teacher feedback. Students’ writing will reflect not only high standard writing skills, but powerful messages based on the students’ lives, hopes, and experiences.
Next, you might stop into a 7th grade writing classroom and watch students practicing their presentation skills as they share pieces they’ve written and give each other feedback on their enunciation, accentuation, pace, and eye contact.
You might descend from the third floor to the second floor where you can enter ta self-contained 8th grade reading classroom where all of the students are reading books on their level and there are charts that show their reading growth up on the walls. The teacher may be working with a small group of children on a particular skill or strategy, while the other students are reading and writing their thoughts on post-its as they read, preparing for conversations they will have later in the period.
You will come across a 7th grade dual language Spanish literacy class, where student are reading a short story written in Spanish, refining their Spanish, while engaging in rich conversations.
The end of the day could be upon you and you will enter an extended day reading class where students are focusing on the vocabulary in their texts and ways to find the meaning of words by finding a word within the word they know or reflecting on the characters emotions or mood. The teacher will give the students one on one attention to give them feedback on their work while teaching them the strategies they need to be independent readers and thinkers.
After school, you will find students everywhere, getting extra help, working on a project, finding a quiet place to read and/or write, or helping their teacher. A day in the life of the ELA department includes all of these scenes and so many more that reflect the enthusiastic, hard-working and talented teachers that are always seeking to find better and more refined ways to help all our children succeed.
At M.S. 223, we believe that learning is a life-long endeavor and our teachers are constantly reading, researching, collaborating, planning, revising, and learning about their craft in order to meet the needs of all of our students. Teachers regularly attend workshops and staff development sessions from various organizations including the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University. We see the teaching of reading as both an art and a science and we incorporate strategies and skills into our curriculum that support all types of readers and writers. Over the years, our ELA test scores have steadily grown, culminating in our 2009 scores which doubled the number of students meeting standards from 6th grade to 8th grade! We now have the highest ELA scores in our district and plan to continue to grow our students’ scores as well as their minds and hearts.
Our curriculum is student centered. We have daily reading and writing workshops that not only focus on the products that readers and writer create, but on the processes as well. Teachers teach mini-lesson and present read alouds, always making sure that the bulk of the time is spent with children doing the work of real writers and readers. Our students love reading and writing. We have worked very hard to make sure that students have the right books in their hands, and that like real readers, they have choices in what they read every day. All of our classroom libraries are packed, and we are constantly ordering new books so that we have the latest titles in the hands of our beloved children. Our students use writer’s notebooks as a way to come up with ideas for their pieces as well as to authentically live as writers in their daily lives. They publish pieces of writing including personal narratives, literary and personal essay, short stories, poetry, editorials, website pages, articles in which they have choices about their topics and final revision work.
We have a highly successful test prep unit that lasts from mid-December until the ELA test at the end of January that integrates the learning of the year while teaching specific test taking strategies and skills. We also provide SETSS, dual language, self-contained, CTT, and bilingual classes that are taught by experienced and highly qualified teachers who teach the school curriculum while catering to our students’ individual needs and strengths.
The core values at M.S. 223 are team work, relentlessness, scholarship, compassion, and reflection and the ELA classes address and nurture these values in our children through our use of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Our ultimate goals are that our students become thoughtful readers, writers, learners, and people who that through their actions and choices, not only better their own lives, but the lives of those in their families and communities.
