Two Views on the "Top(ic) of the Week": The Core Curriculum and Reading Responses

On Wednesdays, my posts will be focused on a "topic" for the week and how it looks from two views (the past week and the upcoming week).

A look back on the past week's lessons:
My 8th grade Literature students THIS year are already benefiting from changes that I made with my 7th and 8th grade students LAST year. And it's all because of the Core Curriculum!

I know many teachers and parents are struggling with the Core Standards, but I've accepted the fact that these are the standards we will be teaching for the next decade or so. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't remind the students that every change, every "boost" of knowledge that I push, is backed by the state of Illinois's adoption of the Core Curriculum Standards.

Luckily, last year, my district agreed to purchased new Literature text sets for the 7th and 8th grades. I guaranteed my administrators that this series had the "Core at the center" and after using this series for a little over a year , I am very happy with it. (Holt McDougal Literature)

One "success" of this series is the follow-through on skills/questions/text throughout a story or unit. (The "blue" skill relates to the "blue" text questions and at the end, all ties to the extended responses and "blue" questions".) It's almost EASY to prepare the students when you have the proper tools!

A plan for the future:
I can foresee more work in store for my 7th grade students. During the first quarter, I've really hit this standard hard:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.7.1: Cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

Here is an example of one of our prompts from last week: Reading Response Prompt for "Zebra" by Chaim Potok

However, my 7th graders still struggle paraphrasing and have a hard time explaining the text they choose to use as evidence. Again, the literature series helps me to prepare them well, but they are not using the writing stems to help them connect the text to the question and struggle using higher level thinking skills and INFERENCES!

As I plan for the upcoming weeks, I need to rethink how I check and develop these skills throughout our readings. If any readers have suggestions, please share! I'll post any insights that I find that work!