Middle School Language Arts

The Reading/Language Arts Office designed our county’s Middle School Reading/Language Arts Curriculum to provide all Grade 6-8 students with instruction based on the Maryland Voluntary State Curriculum for reading, writing, speaking, and listening as well as other skills essential and related to language arts, such as spelling, word study, grammar, and language. (Maryland curriculum documents are accessible on the MDK12 website.) 

Our goal is to accelerate achievement for all students. To do that, Anne Arundel County teachers focus on building skills needed for academic and real world success by using developmentally appropriate approaches and materials that appeal to a wide range of students. The objective is to engage and involve students yet provide the rigor needed to challenge them to reach for higher achievement.

Specifically, instruction is delivered using a variety of texts, including McDougal-Littell’s Language of Literature, InterActive Reader, and Bridges to Literature anthologies, as well as selected novels. Teachers and media specialists involve students in using supplemental informational materials from current media, as well.

Pacing guide documents, created and refined by teachers and resource specialists, lead teachers in planning and supplying a high standard of rich instruction in the literature of stories, poems, essays, novels, drama, biography, and memoir, as well as media-related forms of reading, such as newspaper and magazine articles. Students improve their composing skills with regular assignments in full-scale writing of personal narratives, research papers, essays, and poems. Students also regularly practice timed, on-demand formats of writing similar to those demanded by assessments and courses in high school and college.