Dear Parents and Guardians,

I am looking forward to a fun and productive year with your students! This letter is designed to
help you to understand what, why and how I am going to teach this year.
Through reading research and my own experience, I have formed several philosophies about how
reading should be taught. I use these philosophies to frame lesson plans I have designed for your
students.
First, I have a strong belief that students are most successful in classes where they are
encouraged to actively participate on a daily basis. In order to allow students to explore their
own ideas and learn from others, my classroom will not be largely lecture based. Instead, I plan
on facilitating discussions, placing students in small groups, and assigning student led
presentations as the prominent ways to help students learn.
In addition to this, I also believe that students learn best when a variety of subjects and learning
styles are incorporated into the curriculum. As an English teacher, I plan on relating historical,
scientific, psychological and cultural references to the literature we will be reading this year. By
doing so, I will be giving relevance to the material for students with all interests as well as
introducing them to new ones.
Finally, I believe cultivating a love and passion for reading is crucial to student success. Because
of this, I have devolved my lessons to relate to students and to spark interest. Students will be
encouraged to read all sorts of texts from magazines to classic novels. I will be working with
individual students often to determine reading strategies to best match their ability and interest
level. In addition to individual work, the students will interact often, in order to create a diverse
community of readers.
I will be teaching a spectrum of literature and skills this year. Students will be reading novels
such as Lord of the Flies, plays such as Hamlet by Shakespeare, and will study a variety of
poetry by several authors including T.S. Elliot and Emily Dickinson. As a facilitator, I will be
focusing on helping students to be better readers through pre-reading, during reading and postreading strategies, which work with skills such as active reading and overall comprehension
improvement.
I have designed a multitude of activities and practices to help students improve reading skills and
also to help students understand readings for my class. As I mentioned, my class will encourage
participation as much as possible. Students will be assigned a creative research project relating to
one of the class texts where they will be expected to research outside information but also
connect the text to their interests and talents and present to the class. On a more day to day basis,
students will be doing a variety of activities to improve reading abilities such as practicing text
visualization, making inferences and describing their individual reading processes. Also, as I
mentioned, many daily activities will also include small or large group discussion.

Students will have many opportunities in my classroom to display their strength as readers.
Assessing this will also allow me to assist students when they need help in other areas of reading
ability. Students will be asked to do a number of individual writings ranging from short class
reflections to five page papers. As well as this, I plan to have students read aloud in class and
discuss often. Students will only see formal written quizzes in relation to vocabulary and
summarization of assigned readings. One crucial element to assessing students is that the
students assess themselves. The class will silent read for ten minutes almost every day, and
during this time, I will meet with students to ask about progress, goals, and enjoyment.
Reading and literature instruction are two separate areas of instruction. However, for my class, I
hope to integrate them for most of the course. This way students can connect the two and learn
both sets of skills simultaneously. However, I do understand the differences between the types of
instruction and so will have days throughout the semester dedicated to each one. For example,
students will be spending a lot of time on vocabulary. This is a type of reading instruction and
helps students decode the words on the page. When possible and helpful, I will integrate this
with texts we are reading, however learning root words, suffixes and prefixes will not always
directly relate to what we are reading. On the other end of the spectrum, for literature instruction,
I will spend days focusing on the content and themes of the texts we read for class. On these
days, discussion will be prevalent and students will be assisted with understanding of the text but
not necessarily reading abilities.
Overall, I my instruction has been designed in a way which I believe will help the students
effectively learn the best. Please don't hesitate to email or call if you have questions about what,
why, and how I am teaching your student.
I look forward to meeting you and working together this year!
Amanda Nickless