In developing this unit, I am keeping my future eighth graders in mind. I work in a Pre-K to grade 8 magnet school on the New Haven / West Haven line. The beauty of working in a school of this type is that I will have had my eighth graders for a year already. In my eighth year, I have had the pleasure of watching these kids grow up, which provides me an awareness of what type of literacy instruction they have received and enables me to make adjustments to my instruction to fill in any gaps or to address any areas of need.
Since my arrival, my school has seen a significant boom in multilingual learners, as we continue to see an influx of new families from around the world into our community who arrive with varying levels of English proficiency. As a result, language can become a barrier to learning in a mostly English-language classroom, which is the reason why it is important to find ways that all students have access to instruction. In addition, I also tend to have a good number of students who are special education students, as well as students who have additional needs that are serviced through 504s. For these students, too many text-based materials can be a problem as well.
When instructing, I have historically used a lot of visual material. Visuals not only allow access to all students with vision, but they also tend to be highly engaging. With middle school students, engagement is important, not only for content acquisition, but for classroom management. In considering these elements, I think by expanding my existing teaching toolkit into the area of the tangible material culture, I will be inviting more students into the academic conversation. By expanding to objects, students will have the ability to utilize more of their senses, beyond the visual, in the writing process.
