Another great week! The students came in ready to engage well in our class work.
Our Quick Write this week was inspired by a simple problem that I had getting ready this morning -- I couldn't find my shoes! I asked the students to write about their own personal organization preferences. I put a line on the board to represent a continuum from "Walking Tornado" to "Obsessively Organized." Most students considered themselves Average, which was right in the middle. I also collected some great ideas from the students to help us all be more on tip of the details of life.
Our Words of the Day were again Latin roots:
bene -- Latin," good" -- derivatives: benefit, benefactor, beneficiary, benevolent, benign
belli -- Latin, "war" -- derivatives: bellicose, casus belli, antebellum, belligerent, rebellious
brevi -- Latin, "short" -- derivatives: brief, briefcase, abbreviation, brevity
The next order of business was to discuss our writing assignment, which is a Narrative Essay. The Pre-Write for this essay should be done for this week, and the rough draft is due next week. I took some time to walk through the format for the essays. The essays should be double-spaced and have 1-inch margins. The font can be either Arial or Times New Roman and 12-point. Another topic I covered was Headings and the Header. The Heading needs to have the students name, teacher's name, name of the class, the assignment, and the date. The Header is in the upper right margin and should be the student's last name and the page number. Below in the links portion, I have a link to a Google document that shows what the papers should look like.
We then dove into our reading selection, The Strange Adventure of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I divided the students into 4 groups to talk through the Study Guide questions. We then came together and talked through the first two chapters of the book. This is not a very long book, and I chose it in part because it will be our source for our next round of essays. Writing about literature is an important skill, so this is our opportunity to read carefully, take notes, and then write an essay either about a character or a theme. Included with the handouts last week were two sheets for them to take notes and keep track of information about one of the themes in the book and one of the characters. Additionally, they have a vocabulary worksheet for the book. They are to choose 25 words from anywhere in the book.
Finally, we talked Commas. Last week we discussed commas and compound sentences. After a quick review, we progressed to commas and complex sentences. This is a harder topic because students have to understand dependent and independent clauses in addition to identifying subordinating conjunctions. Students have two worksheets to practice inserting commas into sentences. I have some links below that might be helpful.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read Ch. 3 & 4 (No questions this week.)
-- Keep up with Character, Theme, and Vocabulary worksheets
-- Rough Draft of Narrative Essay
-- Commas & Complex Sentences Worksheet
-- FANBOYS Worksheet
Links for this week:
Have a wonderful weekend!
Mrs. Prichard
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