Norris Middle School, Seventh Grade

Home > Middle School > Seventh Grade > Kathy Hegler > English Seven

English 7 is required for all 7^th graders at Norris Middle School. It meets every other day for 75 minutes per session. Students of varying abilities are grouped together in all six sections. Our literature book, Adventures for Readers, Book One, (Holt, Rinehart, Winston) includes short stories from a variety of cultures, longer stories such as A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, poetry, nonfiction, and mythology from the ancient Greeks as well as other cultures.

All of our reading serves as a starting point for our own writing. Students produce descriptions, narratives, paraphrases, research papers, original poetry, summaries, and original short stories. In addition, we study technical writing and produce how-to papers.

We use Elements of Writing, First Course (Holt, Rinehart, Winston) as a resource for writing skills. The text also serves as a spelling book and grammar handbook for our study of parts of speech, sentence structure, paragraph structure, and composition. For additional practice in writing skills, we use a program in the computer lab called Skillsbank, and we edit sentences in a team activity called the Daily Double. We never run out of things to read and write!