Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 13 (April 27)

Greetings!

I guess I should not have been surprised to see snow showers on my way to CHAT this week.  After all, it is Minnesota.  However, it does make it hard to believe that spring is really here and that we only have two more weeks of CHAT classes.

We had a fun Quick Write this week.  I have a game called "Man Bits Dog."  According to the makers of the game, it's a game of "hilarious headlines."  This game has cards with words that are to be used as headlines, and I incorporated this into our Quick Write by having them write a story to go with the headline.  They were very creative, both in their word combinations and their stories.

Words of the Day:

scio -- Latin, "to know" -- science, scientific, conscience, conscious, omniscient

scrib -- Lain, "to write" -- describe, scripture, script, scribe, scribble, inscribe, subscribe

sens -- Latin, "to feel" -- sensitive, senses, sensible, consensus, sentiment, insensitive, sensory,

spect -- Latin, "to watch" -- spectator, spectacle, spectate, inspector, respect, specimen, introspective

sub -- Latin, "below" -- subway, submarine, suburbs, subzero, sublime, subliminal, sublingual

I didn't have a lot to hand back to students, but they had their final drafts to hand in to me.  I know that some students have been gone due to trips, sports, and illnesses, so any homework that wasn't handed in this week can be handed in the next.  I will have My Gradebook updated this week so that students can check to see if they are missing any assignments.  With only two weeks left in the semester, it's important to get on top of any late homework.

Our final essay for the year is a "Re-Write."  Students rarely have the opportunity to go back to previous assignments in order to revise and improve them.  These are important skills for successful writers to have.  Students are to choose one of their previous essays from this year.  I've encouraged them to choose either their "worst" or lowest scoring essay or to choose one that is about a topic that they are especially interested in.  They should consider the final drafts of their previous essays as the "rough drafts" for this assignment.  Next week, I would like them to hand in their re-write and the final draft of the previous essay.

In addition to reading poetry, we are doing a "Poetry Jam," a competitive poetry reading experience. Each student is to bring two poems next week and to be ready to recite them with a team.  The rest of the class will score the presentations, and the top two teams will read the following week.  (In class we went over the scoring rubric and the competition details.)  Below are the teams:

Team 1

Bryce

Ben

Emily

Corrine

Team 2

Caitlin

Daniel

Jade

Shannon

Gabriel

Team 3

Isabella

Sam

Kayla

David

Macy

Team 4

Elliot

Hayley

Timothy

Cally

Dillon

Team 5

Zoe

Linnea

Christianna

Julie

Sofia

We finished class with a continued look at punctuation, especially the semicolon and commas.  Students have a Mastering the Comma Review worksheet to do for next week.  The following week, I will be giving students a final test on commas to do as a take home test.

Assignments for Next Week:

-- Read the poems by the following poets:  Shakespeare, p. 1; Quarles, p. 4; Bradstreet, p. 6; Longfellow, p. 20; Burgess, p. 39

-- Essay Re-Write

-- Comma Review Worksheet

--  Prepare 2 Poems for our Poetry Jam

Links for this Week

Class Notes

Poetry Out Loud 

     -- Jabberwocky

     -- Pied Beauty

     -- My Mistress' Eyes

Have a beautiful Sunday!

Mrs. Prichard