Wrapping Things Up

Since the school year has just come to an end, I feel like this blog needs some sort of closure too. I haven’t posted in awhile since some of the projects begun on this blog have been taking shape in other forms. Much of the information from the blog now resides at Exploring Language, a website that contains lessons for grades 3-8. It is very much in a newborn stage, so I will be making changes, corrections, additions, etc. Please feel free to send feedback using the contact form on the website. Also resulting from the blogging is an article on the Common Core, spurred by this post that will be published in Wiley-Blackwell’s Compass later this year. And I have a couple of other articles out for review that may be of interest to readers of this blog; when they have a published form, I’ll let you know.

Another good site that Dave Pippin tipped me off to is Englicious (that’s the log in page, but teachers can have a free trial period, and you can read see sample materials before registering here). It’s tied to the UK’s National Curriculum, which is much more of a top-down curriculum than anything we have in the U.S., though with many similarities to the Common Core (which, remember, is not a curriculum). Linguist Bas Aarts, at University College London, is heading up this project, which looks like a good model for us here. Here’s a brochure about the enterprise, and here’s a Telegraph article about the need for more instruction in language, grammar, in particular, that is motivating the Englicious materials.

I may still post here on MiddleSchoolLing occasionally; I do find that I like to spit out stuff here first and hear from some of you; then it can begin to take a more refined form (as a lesson or an article or a conversation with a friend).

Haboo!

(See Angela Roh’s article, “And you can all say haboo: Enriching the standard language arts curriculum with linguistic analysis” in Linguistics at School: Language awareness in primary and secondary education for more on "haboo".)