We might be winding down the semester, but we're still going strong and covered a lot of information today.
Our Quick Write prompt today was inspired by the fact that today was National Poem in your Pocket Day. I heard a few groans and grumblings, but they were good sports and wrote a bit of poetry. I wrote a short diamante, which is a 7-line shape poem. You can see some examples on this poetry site. I look forward to reading their poems.
Our Words of the Day were connected to writing. The following words of Greek origin are considered modes of persuasion and are also referred to as the three artistic proofs. (More explanations of these terms at this site.)
Ethos -- Greek, "nature, disposition" -- In terms of writing and logic, ethos refers to the credibility and authority of the person with the message, in other words, the ethical nature of a person. a person can express his ethos by choosing language and topics appropriate to the audience.
Pathos -- Greek, "suffering, grief" -- In terms of writing and logic, pathos refers to an emotional appeal. This can be done by using meaningful language emotional tone, and emotion-evolving examples.
Logos -- Greek, "word, reason" -- In terms of writing and logic, logos refers to an appeal to logic and reason. This can be done by including facts, statistics, analogies, and citations by authorities and experts.
I did a quick check in about homework and encouraged students to check My GradeBook if they have questions about missing homework. Here's a link for instructions for accessing the site.
Our final essay for the year is an Essay Re-Write. This is a chance for students to rework one of their earlier essays. I suggested to them that they choose an essay they 1) got a low grade on; 2) felt they could do better on or wanted to improve; or 3) that they enjoyed writing and want to add more. As they are rewriting, they should look at their essays from a sentence and word choice level but also from a content consideration. The Essay Re-Write is due next week, and students also need to hand in the original final draft of the essay they are rewriting.
For the Grammar part of our class, we had a quick quiz to check for understanding of simple, compound, and complex sentences. We went through each sentence to identify the subjects, verbs, conjunctions, prepositional phrases, etc. Using these sentences, I felt that some of the aspects of sentence construction and patterns were beginning to really click for most of the students.
For our Poetry discussion at the end of the class, we discussed two of the poems that were assigned for this week. We read aloud "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron and "To My Dear Loving Husband" by Anne Bradstreet. We talked about how the first poem, while it mentions the beauty in looks and character of someone, it was not necessarily a love poem. In fact, one student mentioned that it could even be written about a favorite dog. On the other hand, the Bradstreet poem is one of the sweetest poems written by a wife to her husband.
We start our Poetry Jam next week, so students should bring 2 poems that they are ready to recite in class. A reminder: students will get extra points for original poems and for poems that are memorized. Next week we will divide into teams, and I will explain the scoring.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Prepare 2 poems for the poetry jam
-- Essay Re-Write
-- Any old homework that is not overdue
Links for this week:
Class Notes
Have a great weekend.
Mrs. Prichard
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