Plan for Parents and Students to read

 Here is a parent-and-student-facing version:

My Plan for Teaching ELA 2026–2027

Dear students and families,

I am looking ahead to next school year, and my goal is to make our ELA class feel intentional, connected, predictable, and engaging. I do not want each unit to feel like a separate island. I want students to see that the same big ideas keep coming back across everything we read: courage, power, freedom, choice, language, identity, and what people do when life gets hard.

We will begin the year with J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. This is a strong beginning-of-the-year text because it gives us adventure, character growth, courage, greed, friendship, and a whole world to enter together. After that, we will move into Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, where we will study drama, conflict, family pressure, impulsive decisions, love, language, and tragedy. Later in the year, we will read Frederick Douglass, which will bring us into nonfiction, rhetoric, freedom, education, power, and resistance.

Throughout the year, I want students to understand that literature is not just a collection of random books. It is one long conversation.

We will often use quotes from the authors we are studying: Tolkien, Shakespeare, and Frederick Douglass. Sometimes we may use a quote from one author while studying another author so students can see how ideas connect across texts. For example, a Frederick Douglass quote about reading or freedom might connect beautifully to The Hobbit, or a Tolkien quote about courage might help us think more deeply about Romeo and Juliet.

Our Six-Day Learning Flow

Our class will follow a repeated six-day structure. This gives students a predictable routine while still allowing the lessons themselves to stay varied and interesting.

Day 1: Hook, background, quote, vocabulary, or big idea
Day 2: Read aloud together, listen, pause, explain, and discuss
Day 3: Skill lesson
Day 4: Apply the skill through writing, discussion, or a text-based response
Day 5: IXL practice
Day 6: Quiz

Students will have four days of class and one asynchronous day. We will also use IXL regularly until after Thanksgiving and again until after state testing in April. IXL will not be random busy work. The goal is for IXL practice to connect to the reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, and ELA skills we are already building in class.

Quizzes will happen after several days of teaching and practice. Because the quiz day will rotate, students will have multiple opportunities to show what they know with support, structure, and review.

6th Period: ELA Skills Lab

Sixth period will be used as an ELA Skills Lab. It will not be only IXL, because I want that time to be useful, flexible, and engaging.

In 6th period, we may work on:

Poetry mini-lessons
Quote of the week
Short writing practice
RACE review
Test-taking strategies
Small-group help
Creative ELA activities
IXL support

Poetry will be an important thread throughout the year. Poems are short, but they are powerful. They help us practice tone, theme, figurative language, word choice, inference, and emotional meaning. Poetry gives students a quick way to think deeply without always reading a long chapter or passage.

Writing All Year

Writing will not be something we suddenly start right before ILEARN. Students need writing practice all year so that writing feels familiar, not scary or brand new in the spring.

Each unit will include smaller writing pieces. These may be short responses, discussion posts, RACE paragraphs, personal connections, argumentative responses, or literary analysis paragraphs. Not every writing assignment has to be a giant essay. The point is that students will keep practicing the same writing muscles throughout the year.

In each major unit, students will practice:

One personal connection or personal narrative piece
One argumentative or opinion response
One text-based literary paragraph

For The Hobbit, students might write about a time they had to do something even though they felt unprepared. They might argue whether Bilbo is brave, lucky, or both. They might write a literary paragraph about how Tolkien shows that courage grows over time.

For Romeo and Juliet, students might write about a time a conflict got bigger than it needed to. They might argue who is most responsible for the tragedy. They might write about how Shakespeare shows that impulsive choices can have serious consequences.

For Frederick Douglass, students might write about a time learning something changed how they saw the world. They might argue why education is powerful. They might write about how Douglass connects literacy to freedom.

As we get closer to ILEARN, we will strengthen and organize what we have already practiced. That time will not be “now we start writing.” It will be “now we pull together what we have been building all year.”

Our ILEARN writing focus will include:

How to read a prompt
How to plan quickly
How to write a clear introduction
How to use evidence
How to explain evidence
How to write a conclusion
How to answer argumentative prompts
How to answer literary analysis prompts
How to revise writing with purpose

Pre-Learning and Research

Before each major unit, students will do some pre-learning. This matters because students come to class with different background knowledge, and background knowledge helps students read and write more successfully.

Before a unit begins, students may choose from several big questions, do light research, and discuss their thinking in a post.

For The Hobbit, students might think about quests, greed, courage, or what makes someone a hero.

For Romeo and Juliet, students might think about family conflict, peer pressure, impulsive decisions, or whether teenagers should get to make major life choices.

For Frederick Douglass, students might think about education, freedom, power, and why literacy was so threatening to enslavers.

Then we will connect those ideas back to the text.

Universal Design: How We Read

We read everything aloud together.

I do not assume that students can access difficult texts independently just because the text is on the screen. Reading aloud gives every student a way into the work, including students with reading struggles, attention difficulties, language needs, anxiety, or gaps in background knowledge.

My approach is built on Universal Design. I believe all students can learn. I also know that students do not all enter the lesson from the same place or need the same kind of support. Because of that, I use repeated routines, audio support, visuals, discussion, modeling, vocabulary support, chunked reading, and frequent checks for understanding.

The goal is not to make the work easy.

The goal is to make the work reachable.

In our class, reading aloud means that we read, listen, pause, explain, and think together. Everyone gets access to the text.

What I Want for Students

I want students to practice reading, thinking, discussing, and writing all year, not in panic bursts. I want the class structure to help students feel safe, but I also want the content to stay interesting. We will move from hobbits and dragons, to family feuds and tragedy, to freedom and education, to poetry and writing.

The routine will be predictable.

The ideas will be meaningful.

The expectations will be high.

The support will be strong.

All students can learn, and our class will be built around that belief.