Hello students and parents,

I am currently a sixth grade language arts teacher at Indian Trail Middle. I graduated from East Tennessee State University and have taught at South Side Elementary and Liberty Bell Middle before coming to Indian Trail. My husband and I graduated from E.T.S.U. and liked Johnson City so much that we decided to stay! This is an awesome area, and we love living here.

OVERVIEW OF MY SUBJECT AREA

LANGUAGE ARTS: Sixth grade language arts consist of grammar, reading skills, writing skills, our Latin/Greek based vocabulary program called AH-HA,and our individualized accelerated reader program. Throughout the year, we apply our language arts skills through unit studies of books such as TANGERINE and various short stories from our literature book. The state standards we cover in language arts each nine week period will be sent to you at the beginning of each nine week period.

PARENTS, it is so important that we keep lines of communication open throughout the year. Please contact me at school (610-6000) or through email (taylorv@jcschools.org) any time you have questions or just want to check up on your student's progress. Another valuable tool we use at ITMS is the time tracker. Students use this to write each day's assignments and additional information that they need to make note of. Please check this periodically to see what we're doing in the sujbect areas. This is truly a great communication tool!!

I have listed websites that will reinforce the language arts skills we study during the year. I will add additional sites during the year, so keep visiting!!

The first nine week period we will focus on the following: GRAMMAR SKILLS: common and proper nouns verbs subject/predicate punctuation of direct/indirect quotes READING SKILLS: Reading strategies Main idea/supporting details Inferences (context clues, predictions, conclusions) Text features of fiction/nonfiction materials Identifying media sources Cooperative group roles/skills WRITING SKILLS: Paragraph formations