The AHA! Moment: 6th grade English classes push boundaries

By Joel Bezaire Middle School Assistant Head of Academics (AHA!)

We’re one trimester into our 2024-2025 school year, and I wanted to use this week's AHA! Moment to highlight some exciting things happening in our sixth-grade English classes.

As long-time fans of USN Middle School know, our fifth and sixth-grade students have two English or  English Language Arts blocks. In the past, we’ve divided the work in those two ELA classes differently. Sometimes, one class focuses on literature, and the other on grammar. Other times, it’s been more of an even split of all ELA content between the two classes.

When we needed to hire a new sixth-grade English teacher for this school year, Head of Middle School Shavon Davis Louis, Ed.D. wanted to reimagine the possibilities for this second section of ELA. True to our demonstration school roots, what if we tried something different and innovative? What if it was still, at its core, an ELA class but had more cross-curricular elements with the rest of the sixth-grade classes? What if we could also pull in some STEM elements since we’re always looking for more instructional time for those topics? 

We were fortunate enough to know Dorlisa Dismuke from her time long-term subbing with us last school year, and she agreed to step into this position and has taken this new class structure and run with it.

While still employing many traditional Middle School ELA curriculum components, Dismuke’s sixth-grade ELA class collaborates with the rest of the 6th-grade team on some cross-curricular push-ins and STEM tie-ins. Here’s a recent example:

The concept of wealth plays a significant role in the novel The Westing Game, which Sixth Grade English Teacher Katie Sandidge (Dismuke’s 6th-grade ELA partner) has read with her class for a number of years. In Dismuke’s class, students studied the stock market – from its questionable origins all the way to choosing a portfolio of current stocks to monitor over a multi-week period. Rather than simply focus on “wealth accumulation,” students are also considering the moral and environmental implications of their stock portfolio – all while preloading some important sixth-grade math standards in the area of negative numbers/integers and graphing skills. Dismuke is ending this study on wealth and the stock market with a section on philanthropy – how to donate, where to donate, the importance of generosity, case studies in philanthropy, and more. Students will finish the unit with a persuasive essay on their own philanthropic ideas, desires, and long-term goals.

This neat overlap of ELA skills, history, and STEM learning is just the starting point for this exciting class. We have some cool things planned for after Winter Break, including some possible personal narratives combined with 3D design and maybe even some mathematical code-breaking in the context of a World War II novel. Stay tuned!