Ms. Wellner

English I

Periods 3,6,7

Room 212

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Hello English I POD students and parents!  Welcome and congratulations on being selected for the first ever Kelly High School Freshmen POD!  I have very high expectations for our POD students this year, and of course many fun and exciting activities planned to help us reach those goals.  I encourage you to browse through my website to learn a little more about me and my plans for the course.  And once again, welcome to the POD!

A little about me...

How can you contact me?

Go Packers!

• I began my teaching career at Kelly, and this will be my 4th year here.
• I grew up Medford, a small town in northwestern Wisconsin (Kelly H.S. has more students than the entire population of my home town!)
• Both of my parents are high school teachers, and my dad is also the mayor of my town :)
• I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 2002 and am currently pursuing a Master's degree at the University of Illinois-Chicago--I will finish this December!
• I love to travel! This summer, I took a 3-week trip to Southeast Asia, where I visited Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam (CLICK HERE TO SEE SOME PICTURES FROM MY TRIP!)
• 3 years ago, I began the Chicas club, a club created just for the girls at Kelly to make new friends and have time to discuss issues specific to teenage girls
• For the first time this year, I am coaching the girls' JV volleyball team
• I am an avid Green Bay Packers fan--anyone who cheers for the Bears will automatically fail my class

Email is best:  courtneywellner@yahoo.com

Or you can call me on my cell phone:  773-793-1315

Or leave a message at Kelly for me:  773-535-4900

Illinois State Learning Goals for Language Arts--early high school

So what do these learning goals look like in the actual class?

View a calendar of lesson plans, activities, and homework for the upcoming weeks

STATE GOAL 2:  Read and understand literature representative of various societies, eras and ideas.

STATE GOAL 3:  Write to communicate for a variety of purposes.

STATE GOAL 4:  Listen and speak effectively in a variety of situations.

STATE GOAL 5:  Use the language arts to acquire, assess and communicate information.

In additional to Romeo and Juliet and Speak, our two core pieces of literature, we also read lots of short stories, plays, essays, and poems that represent diverse people and ideas.

Students write in personal journals, communicate with pen pals from another school, write research papers and essays, and work on original short stories and poems throughout the year.  Our final service learning project is a Freshmen Survival Guide completely written by the students.

I love whole class discussions, especially when we're talking about really interesting, controversial topics, such as the Day Without an Immigrant rally and boycott last spring--students have many chances to express their opinions in small groups and with the whole class on these engaging topics.

I've never met a teenager who didn't love to use a computer!  We use technology often to research topics for discussion, to email experts for information, and even to blog with other students from the POD!  Students will also learn to use Microsoft Powerpoint and Publisher to create interesting and effective presentations to demonstrate what they've learned.

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