Greetings!
We had another good class. This is such a friendly group of students, and they interact well with each other and with our discussion topics.
I gave the students four ideas for Quick Writes. Firstly, it was the Ides of March (3/15), which is the date that the Roman Senators killed Julius Caesar, so they could write about something political. Wednesday was Pi Day (3/14), so they could write about something mathematical. I also gave them a prompt from one of my creative writing books: "Eva looked at the egg in her hand. There was nothing left for her to do but contact the FBI." And finally, if nothing inspired them with these prompts, they could draw a picture of a flower yawning. I had quite a variety of creative responses!
Our Words of the Day came from one of our short stories by O. Henry. Instead of looking the words up, we looked at the context of the words to determine the definitions.
decorum -- referring to behavior that is in good taste and appropriate
matrimonial -- related to marriage or married people
poultice -- a soft packet of herbs, etc. applied to the body to relieve inflammation
I handed back the Rough Drafts of their literary analysis of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've told them that this is probably the most challenging writing assignment of the year, and they have done a wonderful job. As I do when I hand back rough drafts, we went over common errors that I found in their papers. We talked about commas, compound sentences, and contractions. We also went over how to incorporate quoted material into an essay and whether a paraphrase should be used instead of a direct quote.
The next item on our agenda was to discuss our Short Stories. (I hope the students are enjoying the O. Henry stories as much as I am!) This week, we discussed "Makes the Whole World Kin" that is a quirky story about a burglar and rheumatism. O. Henry writes stories with quirky endings, and this one is a favorite of mine. This class has done a great job keeping up with the reading assignments, but I did warn them that next week they could have a pop quiz. Just sayin' . . .
For the grammar section, our lesson today was identifying prepositional phrases and then determining if they are adjective phrases or adverbial phrases. They have one worksheet to do.
A note about absences and homework: When students are absent due to an illness, travel, or some other activity, it is up to them to find out what they are missing. All missing worksheets can be found in at least one of the following places: attached to the class notes, a shared Google document (f it's a pdf), or as a blog post (if it's a Word doc). The content of the class and homework assignments can be found in the class notes e-mail, the related blog post, and the syllabus. They can always check with me if something is unclear, but they should also check these other resources.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read Retrieved Reformation (p. 49); The Pimenta Pancakes (p. 29)
-- Complete one worksheet (front and back)
-- Finish Final Drafts
-- 1 Grammar worksheet
Links for this Week:
Class Notes
Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Prichard
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