I love how the students come in first thing in the morning ready for class. They are a bright and attentive group!
Students were given two options for the Quick Write. Thursday was the 50th anniversary of the pilot episode of Star Trek, and they could write something about the show or about "space" shows. Alternately, they could continue the food theme from previous weeks and write about their favorite or least favorite foods. As I expected, a number of students hated foods that others loved. Isn't this diverse world amazing!
I titled our Words of the Day "The Weather Channel" because we talked about the metaphorical use of weather-related words to describe situations:
to steal someone's thunder -- to take credit for something someone else was going to say or actually did.
greased lightning -- refers to doing something incredibly fast
sunny-side up -- a fried egg that is not turned or doesn't have the yolk broken
a flood of applicants -- a very large number of people applying for a position.
Note: Many of these metaphorical expressions have become part of our daily language, and we forget that they are figures of speech rather than literally true. These bits and pieces, we call them idioms, are what makes our language hard for English language learners.
Our next item on the agenda for the day was to discuss the Rough Drafts. My practice is to go over the most common grammatical or mechanical errors when I hand back these papers. In fact, I feel this is a far more effective way to teach grammar because it is in the context of a student's actual use of the knowledge. Since this is the first essay of the year, I also walked students through the symbols that I use. For these papers, some of the most common errors were:
-- Compound sentences & commas (to discuss this, we usually need to spend a lot of time on basic sentence construction)
-- Contractions
-- Paragraph construction
I believe there is some confusion about the Homework related to these essays. Students write their rough drafts and hand them in on the due dates. Then, I take them home and go over them, marking errors and making comments. I bring them in the following week, and the students are to take the essays and make corrections. The result, the Final Draft, is then brought to class, and that version of the essay is the one that I evaluate for a score that reflects their work.
We took the remainder of the class to gather in the groups for the Parts of Speech unit. I was so pleased to hear the productive conversations as they brainstormed and planned.
I adjusted the syllabus to reflect an extra week for planning and the fact that I will lead the presentations with a lesson on Conjunctions. This adjusted syllabus is attached and on the blog.
Two common questions were asked while they were planning:
How long did the presentations have to be? The lesson/teaching/presentation will probably take 10 minutes, give or take. The activity could also take about 10 minutes. I'm budgeting 30 minutes of class time for these.
Do we have to write our own homework? In the past, some students have put together their own worksheets, some have copied pages from a workbook, and some have found worksheets on line. They must have an answer key, and the students will be the ones correcting the worksheets. (This helps them to learn their own topic even better.) We have 25 students in Writing 1; they should make 26 copies so that I can have one, too.
We did not take time to go over our Animal Farm reading assignment next week. Hopefully, we can focus on that next week. To clarify, students should write out their answers to the study guide questions to hand in. The vocabulary words are added to the worksheet and handed in when we're done reading the book. This week students have a Take Home Quiz instead of study guide questions.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read Chapters 3 & 4 of Animal Farm
-- Take Home Quiz
-- 3 Vocabulary Words
-- Final Draft of Descriptive Essay
-- Work on Parts of Speech Presentation
Links for This Week
Class Notes
Enjoy the weather!
Blessings,
Mrs. Prichard
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