We began class this week, as usual, with a Quick Write. This week's prompt was inspired by the fact that it was National Cheese Pizza. I asked the students to write something pizza related. As they shared their responses, they expressed their opinions about square pieces over triangular pieces, thin crusts vs. thick crusts, and the important question regarding the appropriateness of pineapple on pizza.
Our Words of the Day were contributed by students and selected from this week's reading of Animal Farm:
ensconced -- verb, fr.Old French enscunser, "to hide or obscure" -- sheltered, concealed, settled
Animalism -- noun, fr. Latin, animalis, "living, with breath" -- behavior that is characteristic or appropriate to animals
hearken-- verb, fr. German, horchen, "to hear" -- to listen, hear, give heed
Most of the time while the students are writing their Quick Writes I am passing out completed homework, and we follow the Word of the Day work with any questions pertaining to the homework. This week we followed our beginning of class work with the Writing portion of the class. Whenever I hand back rough drafts of essays, I take a good portion of the class to go over common errors in their writing. In my classes I have students label a page "Watch Out For," and under this title they are to list the items that I noted on their corrected rough drafts. We will use this list to develop writing goals as the year progresses. This week we talked about contractions, conjunctions, sentence fragments, subject-verb agreement, and the word "things." For next week, students are to make corrections on their rough drafts so that they can hand in finished Final Drafts of their Descriptive Essays..
Students have read the first two chapters of Animal Farm, so we started our discussion with the first chapter in which we meet the main characters and discover the main conflict/issue of the story. Old Major, the distinguished older leader of the animals gave a rousing speech and taught the animals a song. In the morning class of Writing 1A, we did a little singing. Apparently, the song is a cross between La Cucaracha and Clementine, and obviously, the animals would sound like animals. Half of the class worked on the melody for La Cucaracha and the other half Clementine. The Writing 1B class chose to skip the singing part. (As one student remarked, in a large class you can hide behind the other singers. It's definitely much harder to do in a smaller class.)
Next week, we are going to experience our first Literature Circle. Literature Circles are structured small groups that help students have productive discussions about their reading. Each student is assigned a role, and as they read their chapters, they are to be thinking about their particular contributions to the group. Here are the roles for next week:
Director/Discussion Leader -- Brad
Illustrator -- Brooke S. and Brooke M.
Luminary -- Phillip
Word Nerd -- Stephan
Connector -- Mattie
Summarizer -- Alieana and Raya
I've attached a sheet explaining the details of each of the roles, and you can see the information on this link to the blog.
This week students signed up for their parts of speech. They are to learn about their part of speech and then teach the class. In addition to an explanation, they are to come up with an in-class activity and homework that will help their classmates practice. Below is the list of student groups and their dates for presenting:
Interjections -- Aliena (9/19)
Verbs -- Phillip (9/26)
Adjectives -- Maggie (10/3)
Nouns -- Stephan (10/10)
Conjunctions -- Brooke S. (10/24)
Adverbs -- Brad (10/31)
Pronouns -- Raya (11/7)
Prepositions -- Brooke M. (11/14)
Assignments for Next Week
-- Read Ch. 3 & 4
-- No Reader Responses -- prepare for your role in the Literature Circle
-- No Words, except for Stephan who is the Word Nerd for the day
-- Start researching your part of speech
-- Final Draft of Descriptive Essay
Links for This Week
Class Notes
