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Well standardized testing is halfway finished and then there is only three weeks left of school. So, the big question from my students is "Are we going to learn after testing is over?" My snarky response is "How you can be in the same room with such a great teacher as me and not learn?" Of course, that is a rhetorical question~I don't really want to hear what my seventh-graders have to say to that.

While I won't tell them so, that is a question that teachers struggle with. What meaningful, but short-lived, lessons can we have in the last few weeks of school before our summer vacation?


This year, I'm going to try to get a leg up on Common Core State Standards and teach a historical fiction book: Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction by David Macauley. This is a short book about the fictional construction of a cathedral in France. The illustrations enhance the text with vocabulary and sentence structures that will challenge even the most reluctant reader.

While I'm still working on the lesson plan, I do intend to introduce them to the book by having them look at a list of vocabulary words that I've already pulled from the text and make a prediction about what book we're going to read. I will probably have this displayed in a word splash that I create on Wordle. 

I will give the students a list of constructed response questions as a guide for developing their purpose for reading. Since we have a classroom set of these books, the students will read the text silently and then respond to the questions. The text is so short that the students can have this text read in approximately one hour or slightly less. 

After reading the book, the students will discuss the book with their classmates, then respond to the questions independently and submit as a summative assessment. Afterwards, the students will work in pairs to create a timeline of the construction of the text.

I'm excited about trying something new for a whole group activity. If time allows, I may have the students do an independent research activity related to some aspect of the book.

Melissa Reese Etheridge





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