Middle School Readiness: English Language Arts Summer Camp

In this two-week summer course, students entering the lower middle school grades (5 and 6) will be provided with the tools and practice they'll need to be more academically ready for middle school in the fall. 

By engaging in a series of written activities, students will practice and enhance their grammar, reading comprehension, and writing skills. Each new concept will be taught using a combination of screen sharing (PowerPoint and Word documents) and a white board. Ample time will be allotted during class for applying the concepts and practicing the skills. After each class, students will be provided with class notes (shared as a document attachment in the classroom) and will be assigned a short practice exercise to be completed on their own (in 10-20 minutes) before the next class. This homework will reinforce the concepts being learned each day. The notes may be printed and used as reference during the upcoming academic year.

Class 1: Grammar and Mechanics
Students will fine tune their understanding of the rules of capitalization, punctuation, and word usage. They'll identify and correct common grammatical errors, including the incorrect use of homophones (e.g., "their" or "there" instead of "they're") and subject and object pronouns, substitution of prepositions for verbs (e.g., "should of" instead of "should've"), and use of sentence fragments, misplaced modifiers, and non-parallel sentence structure.

Class 2: Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Note Taking Skills
While at the elementary level, students are still using decoding strategies to build fluency, at the middle school level, they must focus more on interpreting what they're reading and making observations. They are also learning to make inferences about the definitions of new words based on context and use. In this class, students will learn reading comprehension and note taking strategies and apply them to news articles, (which will also introduce them to new vocabulary in a way that replicates real-world scenarios). Students will also be assessed on their comprehension of nonfiction and literary selections by summarizing the texts, making inferences, and answering questions about the main idea, author’s purpose, mood, characterization, character’s point of view, sequence of events, theme, and supporting details. 

Class 3: Writing
In middle school, writing instruction is incorporated with the other strands of English Language Arts to help students see how the components of grammar, reading, and comprehension are tied closely with developing writing skills. Through a series of writing activities that incorporate direct instruction and practice components, students will learn how to answer questions in complete sentences (by including part of the question in their answers) and organize their ideas into structured sample compositions. They'll learn about effective paragraph structure and use tools, such as graphic organizers, to help them with prewriting and planning.

Class 4: Writing (Early Essay Writing)
At the middle school level, students are expected to provide text evidence to support their assertions about the content and rhetoric in the texts that they read. In this class, students will closely analyze the information, ideas, and rhetorical choices that appear in texts. Then, using text-based evidence, "scholarly analysis," and transition words and phrases, they'll write arguments in which they explain and support their opinion and/or points about a topic or theme. They'll also apply critical thinking skills to separate truth from error (or fallacy) and how to follow a line of reasoning through to its end.