As with every week, I have a full agenda for our class period. We started with a Quick Write, which was inspired by the fact that Oct. 24 is the 158th anniversary of the 1st transcontinental telegraph from Justice Stephen Field in California to President Lincoln in Washington, D. C. I asked the students to list as many ways of communicating that they could think of, and we filled the board with our responses. (I'll include a picture of the board on the blog.)
Our Words of the Day were again unusual words. Some could be decoded because they had familiar word stems, but for the others the students came up with creative definitions:
biblioklept -- fr. Greek, biblio, book; kleptes, thief -- someone who steals books
acnestis -- fr. Greek, knestis, spine -- the part of an animal's skin between the shoulder blades that it usually cannot reach.
octothorpe -- the symbol (#). Note: The origin of the word is disputed. Some say it was a practical joke, and others say that it was named by Bell Laboratories to be used in telephone computing language and was named for the 8 legs of the symbol and for James Thorpe whom the originator admired.
augend & addend -- fr. Latin augendum. to augment; addendus, to be added -- these numbers refer to numbers in an addition equation. The first is the augend, and the second is the addend.
Students received their final drafts of the Personal Essays and handed in their pre-writes and rough drafts of their Biography Essays. I will go over these and hand them back next week for them to revise.
We are starting a new book: Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. This is a lovely little book and a good introduction to the writings of Charles Dickens. While not everyone has read or is even familiar with the story, most had heard of Scrooge and his "bah humbug!" In my opinion, this book has one of the best opening lines in all of literature: "Marley was dead, to begin with." The students already had their books, and this week I gave them a paper copy of the introduction, study guide questions, and vocabulary words. Unlike our reading of the Animal Farm, I do not have ala carte reader responses, and I have chosen a list of words from the book from which they can choose their vocabulary words. We also discussed Dickens's use of the words Stave instead of chapter. Stave is a musical term, and since he uses "carol" in the title, it makes sense. (See here for more information.)
We closed out the class with the Conjunctions presentation from Brooke S. She had a School House Rock video and an online game for us to play. Most students finished the homework in class. Next week -- Adverbs from Brad.
Assignments for Next Week
-- Read Stave One of A Christmas Carol
-- Answer 3 Study Guide Questions
-- Define and give the word origins for 4 Vocabulary Words
-- Conjunctions Homework
Links for This Week
Class Notes
Have a great weekend! Enjoy the outdoors before the snow flies!
Blessings,
Mrs. Prichard
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