Again, another productive class. Have I mentioned how much I enjoy teaching this group of students?
With our Thanksgiving Dinners fresh in our minds, the Quick Write was titled "Eat Your Words." I had the students list 10 verbs, 10 adverbs, and 10 adjectives that were related to their eating experience. From all of the gobbling, slurping, munching, and "scarfing" involved, you all must have had a pretty good dinner.
They handed in their Rough Drafts of their History Essays. I look forward to reading them.
We are in the place of our book, A Christmas Carol, where the Spirit of Christmas Present visits Scrooge. The students discovered that there's more in the book than in any of the traditional movies they've seen. We had a good discussion about the more symbolic portion in which the boy Ignorance and the girl Want appear from within the folds of the spirit's robe. I love it when we go beyond the details of what happens in a piece of literature and can discuss deeper meanings and ideas about life. For next week, we're reading Stave Four. Since they have no writing assignments to do, they may do some extra credit work. Of the study questions, they must answer at least 2 questions, but may do more. For the vocabulary, they must give the definitions and word roots for at least 5 words, but they may do more.
As maturing writers, our Grammar discussion has to move beyond simple sentence structures. Most students are reading, talking, and thinking in complex sentences. The challenge is getting our writing skills to catch up with what's in our heads. Just because a brilliant, complicated idea popped into our heads does not necessarily mean that it's grammatically correct. We discussed phrases this week and will continue next week. This week is was prepositional phrases (especially how they function as adjectives and adverbs) and participial phrases. Verbal phrases often trip up writers, so I want to make sure they have a good understanding. They have a worksheet on Participial Phrases as homework.
Have a great week!
Mrs. Prichard
No comments:
Post a Comment