Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 6 (October 3)

Greetings!

Can you believe that it is October already.  I had a beautiful drive to school this morning, seeing the dried stalks of corn and some pumpkin patches.  I don't know about you, but I love Fall.

After praying for our class, we had our Quick Write.  Our family has a favorite game, Man Bites Dog, in which the players are dealt cards with nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and a few prepositions.  The object of the game is to come up with a newspaper headline and to get the highest score by adding up the numbers on the cards.  For the Quick Write, I had the students not only come up with the headline, but write a story to go with it.  By virtue of the random collection of cards, we had some funny headlines.

Our Words of the Day, chosen by 3 class members:

ikebana -- Japaneese -- the Japanese aft of flower arranging

uitlander -- Dutch -- a foreigner, especially a Britain during the Boer War

imbroglio -- Italian -- Originally referred to a thick use of paint or pigment; a misunderstanding or confusion.

I handed back to the students some graded assignments, including their Rough Drafts of their Personal Essay.  As with all rough drafts, students should expect to see a number marks on their papers since rough drafts are learning experiences.  I had them engage in a cooperative learning experience.  In other words, they did a group exercise.  Looking at their papers and a list errors common to rough drafts, they were to work as a group to determine which ones they thought would be important for the class to discuss.  With 2 suggestions from each group, we had a good discussion.

The Final Drafts of their Personal Essays are due next week.  Along with the finished paper, I would like them to include a list of 5 changes/corrections/improvements that they have made and their reasons for the changes.

We had little time at the end of the class to discuss Animal Farm.  The portion they read for this week begins to show quite a few cracks in the plans and schemes of the animals.  We'll take time next week to discuss it at length. 

Next week, we will have a Grammar Quiz .... more on that later.

Assignments for Next Week:

-- Read Chapters IX and X in Animal Farm.

-- Write the Final Draft of the Personal Essay

-- List 5 changes made along with reasons for making them.

This week's blog post

Class Notes

Common Errors in Rough Drafts

Have a great weekend,

Mrs. Prichard