Greetings!
I thought I might have to swim to school yesterday. Later in the afternoon we watched it rain so hard that the parking lot was flooded. Hopefully all are safe and dry.
Our
Quick Write today was inspired by the trivia question on the board at Caribou Coffee this morning: Who said, "Question everything"? (Socrates) I gave the students a number of choices: Write something all in questions; write a "Bucket List" of questions; respond to the quote. As responses, students asked what the meaning of life was and something about a woodchuck! I also showed the students a presentation by a spoken word artist,
Taylor Mali, titled "Conviction." He speaks about that trend to end sentences so that they sound like questions; he also encourages students to speak (and write) with conviction and authority.
The Words of the Day were:
contralto -- fr. Italian, contra, "against" and alto, "high" -- a the lowest vocal range for a female, between a mezzo-soprano and a tenor
emeritus -- fr. Latin, mereri, "to earn" -- an honorary degree earned upon retirement
mange-tout -- fr. French, "eat all" -- a variety of garden pea in which the pod is also edible.
Following our beginning of class activities, the students took the Pre-Test for our Parts of Speech unit. The bulk of this test asked them to identify the various parts of speech (interjections, verbs, adjectives, nouns, conjunctions, adverbs, prepositions, and pronouns) within sentences. This test will be our baseline that we will compare to the Post-Test that they will take after they've given their presentations.
Next week we start our Parts of Speech presentations. Below is the schedule for each week:
Week 5 (9/24) -- Nouns (Tadashi)
Week 6 (10/1) -- Pronouns (Jonathan G., Jeremiah)
Week 7 (10/8) -- Adjectives (Brady, Daniel)
Week 8 (10/22) -- Adverbs (Jack)
Week 9 (10/29) -- Verbs (Jonathan S., Eden)
Week 10 (11/5) -- Prepositions (William, Samuel)
Week 11 (11/12) -- Conjunctions (Greta, Ella)
Week 12 (11/19) -- Interjections (Cassie, Isabelle)
Week 13 (12/3) -- Review
Week 14 (12/10) -- Parts of Speech Test
The final drafts of the Descriptive Essay were due today. I had forgotten to mention to the students that I also want them to hand in the corrected rough drafts along with the final drafts. Some of them brought them, and others did not. For this essay, it's OK either way. Going forward, I will remind them to hand in both drafts. I like to see how they made corrections and revised their own work.
Our next essay is a
Personal History Essay. While the topic/subject for this essay is pretty close to home (themselves!), the challenging part will be to come up with a thesis statement. In other words, they not only will tell a bit of a story, but they need to express some opinion or stand with it. A Personal History Essay is a blend of narration and analysis -- a story with a purpose. These narratives can be about a special event, a difficult experience, a celebration, etc. I've included on the blog a couple of
videos about writing thesis statements.
For our literature discussion, I divided the class into 4 small groups to discuss one of the 4 chapters that we've read so far in Animal Farm; they were to specifically talk about the events in that chapter, the characters, and any problems or issues that arose in the chapter. Following the small group discussion, we came together for a brief overview of Chapters 1 - 4.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Write the Rough Draft of the Personal History Essay
-- Prepare your Parts of Speech presentation
-- Read Chapters 5 & 6 of Animal Farm
-- Answer 2 Study Guide questions; fill in 3 Vocabulary words
Links for this Week:
Class Notes
Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Prichard
