We had a great class yesterday. The room has been set up in rows instead of the U-shape that I started the year with. A number of students said that they prefer the U-shape, so we began the class by rearranging the tables and chairs.
Our Quick Write prompts came from the National Days for March 1: National Peanut Butter Lovers/ Minnesota/ Pig/ Horse Protection/ and "Dadgum that's Good" Day. The other option was inspired by the March 2 birthday of Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss).
Our Words of the Day were not from my book of foreign words and phrases but are words from "The Gift of the Magi," our next literature assignment.
parsimony -- Latin, parcere, "to be sparing" -- to be extremely unwilling to spend money or to part with resources
mendicancy -- Latin, mendicare, to beg -- the practice of begging
meretricious -- Latin, merere, "to earn, gain, or deserve" -- describing something that has a good outward appearance but little inward value.
After our beginning of class activities, we looked over the homework that I had handed back. One piece was of particular interest -- the list of finished and/or missing assignments with scores. If an assignment had a zero, it is too late to hand it in unless a student had been absent due to an illness. If an assignment hasn't been handed in but is still within the allowed time, I wrote the "last chance date" on it. As of yesterday, My GradeBook was up to date with all assignments. If you have any questions about scores or homework, please don't hesitate to send an e-mail.
We talked at length about their next essays, their Literary Analysis of a theme or character from our book, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As I've told them, this is probably the hardest paper they will write all year. We discussed ways to organize the essay and to develop a thesis statement.
We've finished one book and are headed into our next, a series of short stories by O. Henry. For next week, we will read two, "The Gift of the Magi" and "After Twenty Years." They are to read the stories and write on the worksheet that I gave them three questions that come to mind that we can use for classroom discussion.
For Grammar, we worked again on sentence patterns with linking verbs, predicate nouns, predicate adjectives, and direct objects. They have one worksheet to do.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read "Gift of the Magi" (p. 1) and "After Twenty Years" (p. 21)
-- Complete Worksheet with 2 discussion questions
-- Rough Draft of Themes or Character Essay
-- Complete Themes, Character, and Vocabulary Handouts
-- Sentence Patterns Practice Worksheet
Links for this Week
Class Notes
Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Prichard
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