Welcome to the ICTC Middle School Blog for teachers! This blog is designed primarily for 6th, 7th, and 8th Grade Teachers. The blog will be updated with new ideas and resources to use in your classroom. We hope this is helpful as you begin the school year.

From here you can link to ICTC's other grade levels blogs. Feel free to go between blogs and get ideas from them all. Over time you will also find links to teacher websites, field trip ideas, as well as pictures and video clips.

These blogs should be interactive. Please sign up as a follower, and feel free to leave comments on the blog. Let us know what we could do to make the blog more useful. If you have suggestions or questions, we would love to hear them! This is a great opportunity to learn from each other!

Getting to Know Each Other: Celebrating Students' Cultural Heritage

Check out this lesson, inspired by George Ella Lyons' poem, 'I Am From'. The format of this poem is accessible to a range of ages and learning styles. Students can invoke ordinary sights, sounds, smells, from their lives to paint a vivid picture of their family and cultural identity.

Sharing your own writing in genres that you assign to students can build trust and show students you are willing to take the same academic risks you are asking them to take. In addition, it can be a great way to model the process, including your struggles and strategies.

Instruction begins when you, the teacher, learn from the learner; put yourself in his place so that you may understand . . . what he learns and the way he understands it. Soren Kierkegaard

http://www.scholastic.com/dreamincolor/pdfs/TeachWiththePoster.pdf