Teaching Middle School Language Arts: Incorporating Twenty-First Century Literacies

"Teaching Middle School Language Arts" is the first book on teaching middle school language arts for multiple intelligences and related twenty-first-century literacies in technologically and ethnically diverse communities. More than 670,000 middle school teachers (grades six through eight) are responsible for educating nearly 13 million students in public and private schools. Thousands more teachers join these ranks annually, especially in the South and West, where ethnic populations are ballooning. Teachers and administrators seek practical, time-efficient ways of teaching language arts to twenty-first-century adolescents in increasingly multicultural, technologically diverse, socially networked communities. They seek sound understanding, practical advice, and proven strategies for connecting diverse literature to twenty-first-century societies while meeting state and professional standards. "Teaching Middle School Language Arts" provides strategies and resources that work. Roseboro's concise book provides an entire academic year of inspiring theory and instruction in multimedia reading, writing, and speaking for the twenty-first-century literacies that are increasingly required in the United States and Canada. An appendix includes supplementary documents to adapt or adopt, and a companion web site is designed to continue communication with the readers. Contents include: (1) Foreword: Amazing Grace by Carol Jago; (2) Preface: Teaching at the Intersection of Old and New Literacies by Quentin J. Schultze; (3) Introduction; (4) Networking Socially at the Start of a School Year; (5) Unpacking the Story and Understanding the Genre; (6) Exploring Traditional and Contemporary Grammars; (7) Discussing and Writing Short Stories: Where Story Meets Genre; (8) Checking Out a Twentieth Century Novel; (9) Teaching Classical Fiction: Where the Ghosts of the Past Speak Today; (10) Taking T.I.M.E. to Teach Poetry; (11) Versing Life Together; (12) Opening the Past Imaginatively: Teaching Historical Fiction; (13) Playing It Right: Reading, Performing and Writing Drama; (14) Celebrating Names: A Unit about Community and Identity; and (15) Congratulations and Bon Voyage!