Friday, February 17, 2017

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 5 (February 16)

Greetings!

We had a good class this week even though I made to take frequent breaks to sneeze or deal with my runny nose.  Our Quick Write prompt this week was to finish and elaborate on this sentence:  "NEWS ALERT!  Writing 1 has a bad case of the ...."  For students who are willing, I will put their Quick Writes on the class blog.

Our Words of the Day:
equa/equi -- Latin, "same/even/level" -- equal, equation, equality, equinox, equilibrium, equate, equidistant
ex/e -- Latin, "put out of" -- exclude, exterior, exclaim. excavate, exhale
extri/extra -- Latin, "outer, outside of" -- extricate, extraterrestrial, extract, extraction, extraordinary, extrovert

Students handed in the Final Drafts of their Narrative Essays.  If a rough draft was handed in late, I will get it back to them within the week so that the final draft can be brought to class after our break.  We are now ready to start our next essay.  This may be the hardest essay that they will write this year because it is an essay with few options and more guidelines.  For this essay, they are to do a literary analysis and write about either a character or a theme.  

In class we discussed critical and analytical thinking as we talked about how to take apart and then put back together a piece of literature.  We talked about the essay and the book, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,  at the same time this week.  Students should use the charts they have been working on as their "research" for this paper.  The Pre-Write is due March 2.

We took a longer time to work on our Comma studies.  As I corrected the worksheets, I saw that we needed some more time to go over subordinate clauses/complex sentences, introductory elements, and items in a series.  After a quick review, I divided the class into groups.  Their first assignment was to review as a group to make sure each one of them could explain subordinate/dependent clauses to someone else.  We used the rest of the time to work through the other two uses for commas:  introductory elements and items in a series.

We do not have class next week, so they have two weeks to do their assignments.

Assignments for March 2:
-- Read Ch. 9 & 10 of Jekyll/Hyde
-- Answer 2 study guide questions for each chapter
-- Pre-Write for Themes/Character essay
-- 3 Comma Worksheets (if not completed in class)

Links for this Week:
Class Notes

Have a great weekend and a lovely break!
Mrs. Prichard

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