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Home : 2007 : February : 17

By Margaret916

We do this in our sixth grade at our school. They're broken up like this:

1. Math
2. Health and Science
3. Social Studies
4. Writing and Grammar
5. English (focus on Reading and Spelling)

We
used to do just always 5 periods a day -- but because of requirements and the way the middle school does it, they've experimented with a block schedule (math every day, 2 of each of the other periods) and others...

We don't teach the same subject twice because we have the same number of teachers we would have if we had self-contained classes, so most of our class sizes

are around the average anyway -- does that makes sense? Everyone rotates through, so at any given time we've got the grade split 5 ways.

We have one period around lunch that gets strange b/c of specials. Music and PE are 35 minutes each and art is 55 minutes. So on the day that the kids (grouped by homeroom for specials) have PE or music, they have silent reading time or study hall time or other homeroom activity in that 20 minutes that is different to allow all 6th grade to go to lunch at the same time. This way also provides the teachers common planning time 5 days per week (every other grade level is jealous).

Does this help? Another way we've done it at the 5th grade level when we had 6 teachers was to pair up and each of us chose ss or science. If I taught ss to my class and my partner's class, she taught them both science. We ability group for math (compacted, mixed, supported) and then everyone teaches their own total language arts block (spelling, writing, reading, oral language, etc). So theoretically a kiddo could have 3 different teachers (math, ss/sci, homeroom) in 5th, then move to the 5 differnet teachers in 6th and be prepped for all 8 difffernet teachers they will have in middle school grades. Make sense?