Article+of+the+Week

Many of our middle school readers struggle for two reasons: a lack of prior knowledge to connect to what they're reading and an inexperience in approaching academic and real-world text.

Beyond simple, voluminous reading for fun in our classrooms every day, our students will be given an Article or the Week to read and respond to--a piece of real-world text to help build our students' background knowledge about the world they inhabit.

The idea comes from Kelly Gallagher, whose website includes updated lists of the articles he and his colleagues assign their students each week.

Throughout the year, as we find articles of interest in newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc., post them here for our department to use in our classrooms.


 * Possible Articles**

"The Underage Drinking Epidemic" by Emily Listfield for //PARADE Magazine//, 06/12/11 "Hanover's New 'Solar System'" by Tim Stonesifer for //The Evening Sun//, 06/21/11 "Failing Cyber Schools" - Editorial from //The Evening Sun//, 06/23/11 "The Return of ZombieX: Rob Gaudette Teaches Beyond the Test" by ZombieX, a 12-year-old public school 7th grader, blogging for //K-12 News Network//, 06/24/11 "Hanover: Hands Off Those Phones" by Tim Stonesifer for //The Evening Sun//, 07/01/11 "The Founding Fathers, Unzipped" by Simon Schama for //Newsweek//, 06/26/11 "Shoot Down Sunday Hunting" - Editorial from //The Evening Sun//, 07/05/11 "Kid Lit Unbound" - by Jeff Kinney, author of //Diary of a Wimpy Kid//, for TIME Magazine, 07/18/11 "An Education in American Life" - by Heather Faulhefer for //The Evening Sun//, 07/23/11 "Getting bin Laden: What Happened That Night in Abbottabad" - by Nicholas Schmidle, for The New Yorker, 08/08/11 - much longer piece that would be interesting to read as a group in class


 * Articles Used**