A Rocket & Raven series
A free online middle-school English language arts course for Grades 6 to 8: cite evidence, find theme and central idea, follow plot and character, weigh word choice and point of view, read informational texts, trace arguments, and write a narrative, an explanation and an argument for The Signal, the crew's neighborhood paper, plus a Press Day each week.
Reading and Writing is a free online English language arts course for Grades 6 to 8 that needs only a notebook and a pencil. The crew turns a porch corner into the Signal Desk and publishes The Signal, a small neighborhood paper, and every week's reading teaches a skill the week's writing needs. Students read a fresh passage each day, answer questions that send them back to the text, and write a Signal notebook entry: a sentence with evidence, an objective summary, a scene told by a different narrator, a paragraph that explains, a claim with reasons. They write a narrative, an explanation and an argument over the twelve weeks, then plan, revise and edit them for Press Day. Every passage is original fiction or writing about the crew's own neighborhood, apart from two public-domain poems named in the sources, and the course maps week by week to the Common Core Grade 6, 7 and 8 reading, writing and language standards. Short lessons run Monday to Friday, with a Writing Lab each Wednesday, and Saturday is Press Day.
The course is free, start to finish.
Free online middle-school English language arts course · 12 weeks
A porch newsroom: evidence, theme, plot and character, word choice, point of view, informational texts, arguments, and writing a story, an explanation and an argument for Press Day.
Nothing. Reading and Writing is free from start to finish, with no card. A free parent account saves each student's progress.
A notebook (the Signal notebook) and a pencil. Nothing to print.
It stands on its own. Story Trail (Grades 2 to 3) teaches reading comprehension strategies; this course assumes a student who reads on their own and adds evidence, theme, craft, arguments and the three kinds of writing.
Every passage is original fiction with the crew or writing about their made-up neighborhood, written for the lesson. Week 11 reads two public-domain poems, named in the course sources. No real-world facts are taught as facts.
The Common Core Grade 6, 7 and 8 standards for Reading: Literature, Reading: Informational Text, Writing and Language, listed week by week in the course.