Saturday, October 26, 2013

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 9 (October 24)

Greetings!

Another great week at CHAT.  What can I say?  These are great kids who work hard and engage well in the class.  Our Quick Write for this week was titled "Harvest Time."  As I drive to school in the morning from Northfield, I see those corn and bean fields being harvested one row at a time.  I'm a small-town Iowa girl, so I've always loved farms and gardening.  I asked the students if they could plant any kind of seed that would grow anything they wanted, what would it be?  We had gold and money trees, and even a book tree.

Our Words for the Day were 2 that I chose:
lollygag -- to loiter aimlessly; 
dillydally -- to waste time, especially by indecision
(Note: These words were not given as subtle hints about their work ethics.  They came up in another setting, and I thought they were fun words.)

The students handed in the rough drafts of their Examples/Illustrations Essays.  I had asked them to pay special attention to their introductions and conclusions.  I'm looking forward to reading them.

We had finished our book, Animal Farm, and had presentations about the characters last week.  This week we had an "exam" of sorts.  The test was a 4-page, multiple-choice test.  I divided the class into groups of three so that they could do the test together.  My goal was that they continue to engage with the book and learn via the discussions with others.  Following the written portion, I divided the class again into two teams and asked them more questions.  They did well!

I handed out our next book, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.  This is one of my all-time favorite books, and I love sharing it with students.  It's a good entry book for those who have not read any Dickens or any Victorian literature.  We'll go over a thorough introduction next week.

I ended the last few minutes with some Grammar discussion. We looked at the differences between prepositions/prepositional phrases and subordinating conjunctions/ dependent clauses.  Some words that we might quickly pick out as prepositions are really functioning in the sentence to introduce a dependent clause.  For their homework, they are to write a sentence for each of the subordinating conjunctions below (14 sentences):
while, whether, until, once, although, because, even if, if, since, so that, unless, whenever, before, after.

Assignments for Next Week:
-- 14 sentences with subordinating conjunctions and dependent clause

This Week's Blogs

Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Prichard

No comments:

Post a Comment