I finished the book 180 Days by Kelly Gallagher and Penny Kittle earlier this week. It was amazing- definitely lived up to all the hype I saw on Instagram and Twitter.
For those of you that haven't seen it, 180 Days is a one year story of Gallagher & Kittle's 9th grade classrooms. They walk you through how they set up their reading and writing units for the entire year. It's geared towards ELA classrooms, and more towards high school, but I found it adaptable to middle school.
I'm excited to implement more independent and choice reading this year, something I was planning before I read this book. I plan on pretty closely following their timeline for reading. It suggests independent reading, then book clubs, then a core text, and then you repeat the whole thing, and then you finish the year with either independent reading or book clubs.
The writing units are more geared towards high school standards, and include more units/topics than our curriculum requires, so I'll have to make some adjustments from their schedule. Still, the pacing is nice to see and they go into detail about how they work through the major units- narrative, informational, and argumentative. Those are the ones I will be keeping, so that section of the book was really helpful.
The one thing I didn't like about the book is that even though they recommend reading and writing conferences, they don't go into depth on how they get those done. (I haven't watched/reviewed all of the online resources yet though.) I think conferences will make a real difference in the classroom, so I'm looking forward to finding more resources to help with that.
Have you read 180 Days? What did you think?
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