Welcome parents, students, other interested readers and writers!

I am delighted to be your English teacher this year.

Each student will also be expected to keep a writer's notebook. This is a book, rather like a journal, where writers can write down all kinds thoughts, occurrences and ideas for writing. Writers must write in their writer's notebooks every day.

My 8R students (periods 2 and 3) will often work in what is known as a writer's workshop. In other words, we will be concentrating our efforts at becoming better writers by writing a great deal. We do this by reading and studying different genres, or types of writing. Once we have examined and studied a genre for literary merit, craft, meaning, etc., we write in that genre ourselves. We will begin our writers' workshop this year with a genre study in memoir. Memoir is a kind of writing that deals with memory. The writer chooses as a topic a memory from his or her distant or not so distant past. Memoirs are generally short and written in prose, although many poems can also be considered memoir. Memoir is one of my very favorite genres, and I hope you will enjoy reading and writing it as much as I do.

My 9H students (period 5) will be following a curriculum tailored to meet both the high school requirements for the 9th grade honors program as well as 8th grade English/Language Arts requirements. We will be reading a great deal of truly wonderful literature together and using our writer's notebooks primarily as response journals. Some of the texts we will read together include To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, The Odyssey, Of Mice and Men, and Ethan Frome, as well as many short stories and poems. For our first novel together, we will delve into the suspense adn intrigue of Charles Dickens' classic coming of age novel, Great Expectations.

I hope we will all have a wonderful year learning together.

--Ms. Quinson