We had another full day in class. The Quick Write is always our first task, following prayer, of course. Last semester I had the students give me some ideas for quick writes, and I will be using those throughout this semester. The prompts are numbered, and I call on various students to choose a number. This week's prompts were #45 -- Write about your pet; and #220 - Who is the best Super Hero? As always, when students don't feel inspired by the prompts, they can write about anything else that is one their minds.
Our Words of the Day for this week were also chosen by the students. For most of the class times, I will have a couple students choose words from my book Foreign Words and Phrases. Some times we will try to guess what a word means, and some times we'll discuss how the original Latin or Greek word arrived at it's current meaning. To illustrate this point, I chose lasagna as one of this week's words. Lasagna comes from the Latin word lasanum, which means "chamber pot." This layered one-dish meal was probably cooked in a pot similar in shape to the chamber pot that early Romans used.
Our words:
incunabulum -- fr. Latin incunabula, "swaddling clothes, cradle, birthplace, beginnings," -- a book or pamphlet printed in Europe before the 1500s. Incunabula are not manuscripts, which are written by hand, but products from the infancy of the printer's art.
infante -- fr. Latin infans, "child" -- Any son of the king of Spain or Portugal, except the oldest or heir apparent.
lasagna -- fr. Latin lasanum, "chamber pot" -- a baked Italian dish consisting of wide strips of pasta cooked and layered with meat or vegetables, cheese, and tomato sauce.
Students are to be working on their Rough Drafts of their Narrative Essays. We talked briefly developing thesis statements. This can be one of the hardest part of writing an essay. Students often don't have difficulties reporting information, but focusing that information on a particular stand or opinion can be more challenging. I am looking forward to reading their papers.
We have started The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. For discussion of the first two chapters I divided the class into small groups. Because the class is large, whole class discussions do not always give everyone an opportunity to engage. As I circulated and joined in the discussions, I was pleased with how focused and thoughtful the comments were. After the small groups, we talked about what made for a good small group discussion. We discussed how to make the most of a discussion if you came unprepared, how to respectfully disagree, and how to add meaningful comments. For next week, they are to read chapters three and four, but they do not have to do any discussion questions. (Someone asked if they could do questions for Extra Credit. That is perfectly OK.)
We were able to spend more time with our Grammar portion of the class. We're working on sentence structures this semester, so we started with the simplest of N-V sentences. We worked as a class on the first worksheet, and they have two worksheets as homework.
Assignments for Next Week
-- Signed Spring Class Policies
-- Read Chapters 3 & 4 (no study guide questions)
-- Narrative Rough Draft
-- Grammar Worksheets:
-- Subject-Verb Agreement
-- Finding Complete Subjects and Predicates
Links for This Week
Class Notes
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