WASHBURNE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
Wordmasters 2012
Wordmasters 2012 Gradae 8 Blue Division Word List (PDF)

Wordmasters 2011

CALLING ALL WORDSMITHS…

Is your child interested in expanding his or her word knowledge and verbal reasoning abilities? Washburne is offering a before school program to prepare students for the WordMasters Challenge, a national language arts competition that addresses higher-level word comprehension and logical abilities and helps students learn to think both analytically and metaphorically. It requires students to solve analogies based on relationships among words they have learned.

Three times per year, students receive a vocabulary list from WordMasters, they learn the multiple meanings of these words and think about possible relationships among them. They must also be sure to understand the part of speech of a word, to pay close attention to prefixes and suffixes as clues to meaning, to apply the idea of positive and negative connotation, and to familiarize themselves with multiple forms of these words. Students will be challenged to understand, in cases where words have similar meanings, the contexts in which one might choose one word over another.

The WordMasters before school program for the first of the three challenges this year will meet in Ms. Bertacchi’s room (S104) on the following dates from 7:30 – 8:15 am:

GRADE 7:
Tuesday October 25th – Intro to Analogies
Wednesday, November 2nd – 7th grade WordMasters vocabulary work
Wednesday, November 9thth – 7th grade WordMasters vocabulary work
Wednesday, November 16th – 7th grade WordMasters vocabulary work
Wednesday, November 30th – 7th grade WordMasters review session
Week of December 5th – WordMasters Challenge (exact date TBA)

GRADE 8:
Tuesday October 25th – Intro to Analogies
Tuesday, November 1st – 8th grade WordMasters vocabulary work
Tuesday, November 8th – 8th grade WordMasters vocabulary work
Tuesday, November 15th – 8th grade WordMasters vocabulary work
Tuesday, November 29th – 8th grade WordMasters review session
Week of December 5th – WordMasters Challenge (exact date TBA)

PLEASE E-MAIL MS. BERTACCHI DIRECTLY TO SIGN UP!
jenniferbertacchi@winnetka36.org

7th Grade Word List (PDF)

8th Grade Word List (PDF)

Curricular Components

Writing:
Each trimester, students will be required to complete one major writing piece (pre-writing/outlining, multiple drafts, peer and self-editing, final copy). At times, students will take part in Writer’s Workshop, inspired by the work of Lucy Calkins.

In addition to this major piece, over the course of two years, students will have practice writing in the following genres:

• Paragraph length essay responses
• Narrative/Memoir
• Creative (e.g. short story writing and thematic/project based)
• Interpretive essay
• Poetry
• Persuasive

Literature:
7th and 8th Grade literature text selections may include but are not limited to: Journey myths, short Stories/Junior Great Books selections, The Giver, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, A Christmas Carol, Boy, The Outsiders, The Pearl, A Raisin in the Sun, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Book Thief, Of Mice and Men, All Quiet on the Western Front, Night, There Are No Children Here, Our America, Ender’s Game, Fallen Angels, Soldier’s Heart, Animal Farm, Murder on the Orient Express, selected Shakespeare plays, assorted poetry.

Students will also work to develop a system for marking text (annotation) to strengthen comprehension, text analysis, and class discussion.

Independent Reading:
In addition to the required in-class reading assignments, students are required to spend time each day reading self-selected texts. Although students are not required to mark/annotate or study these texts per se, they will be required to report on at least one per month and to turn in a log of what they have read.

Vocabulary:
One main component of the vocabulary program at Washburne is the study of prefixes, suffixes, and Greek and Latin roots to improve vocabulary comprehension and spelling. Students will also study vocabulary in context within classroom texts.

Grammar:

• Parts of speech: review as necessary
• Parts of sentence: subject, predicate, object
• Punctuation: comma usage, apostrophe usage, colons and semi-colons
• Sentence types: compound, complex, and compound-complex and how to punctuate each
• Phrases and clauses
• Punctuating dialogue & punctuating quotations/citations
• Subject/verb agreement
• Subjective/objective case (I vs. me, she vs. her, etc.)
• Verb tense consistency