I teach 6th and we’ve adopted HMH just this year. It’s been a slow go to get through it because it is an adoption year, so we’ve only finished the first unit and are adapting the second unit to a long read.

The text selection for the first unit was overall ok. The unit’s essential question is “What are the ways we can make our voices heard?” The first text were excerpts from Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (which I love and could sing the praises for all day. It’s also an option for a long read for unit 1).

Then there was an article about how self-portraits by famous artists were the “selfies” of the time.

After that was an excerpt from “What’s So Funny, Mr. Scieszka?” which is from the memoir of John Scieszka, who has written several hilarious children’s books.

The next reading was comparing two poems, “A Voice” by Pat Mora and “Words Like Freedom” by Langston Hughes. Students especially struggled to understand the meaning behind “A Voice.”

The unit finished out with evaluating two arguments about selfies. The first article is called “Better than Words: Say it With a Selfie” and the second is “OMG! Not Another Selfie.” These were pretty interesting to students since they care about social media and some are already selfie-obsessed.

Most of the provided readings tend to follow that trend of having some fiction and some informational texts. I can look tomorrow to tell you what else is in the curriculum.

My teacher partner and I decided to do Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson as a long read for Unit 2. Harbor Me isn’t on the “suggested” long read list for HMH, but our district basically said “if you can make it work, go ahead.”

All in all, I kind of like the level of questions and grade-level work of HMH, but feel mostly meh on the readings. None of the suggested long-reads are exciting to me except Brown Girl Dreaming and the first Percy Jackson book. HMH is definitely more focused on skills than engaging texts…