Students Create This Projects in 9th Grade Honors English

Mrs. Mary Rice, English teacher at Springville Junior High School, said, “As SJHS ninth graders start their freshman year their understanding of literacy changes and becomes more sophisticated.” In Mrs. Rice’s Honors English classes, her students created their own “This” projects. Students added things like physical setting, ideological setting, symbols, plot, and theme to their “This” projects and their understanding of narrative structure.  According to Mrs. Rice, the idea of the project was to begin the process of giving students tools to become better thinkers about text and introduce the idea of disciplined re-reading.  The students used their summer reading to demonstrate and complicate their knowledge of literary theory with multi-genre representations. 

Kahaia Stewart, ninth grader at SJHS, said, “The 'This' project is just like a creative book report; it isn’t very difficult, it is just time consuming. I learned new types of literacy elements that were different from what I had been learning since elementary school.”  Mrs. Rice was impressed with the projects and the number of people that turned them in on time. She also said, “I live and teach in a community of people who have the intellect to be great scholars and prominent citizens. I am honored to support their thinking and hone their dispositions to live optimally significant lives.”