We had a good time in class this week. This is a good group of students, and I always enjoy the time I have with them in class.
As many of you know, the church has expressed that students must wear masks in the hallways, common areas, and classrooms. If students are exempt, parents must communicate with Laura Johnson, who will communicate with tutors. Some teachers allow students to snack and/or drink in their classrooms, but the church doesn't allow food in the clubhouse, which is the room where my writing classes take place. (They can have water.) This week a few students were snacking, and I let it go. Next week, only water. I know that some students are not happy with having to wear masks in class, but they all had great attitudes and seemed willing to bless the church and its leadership.
Our Quick Write today had 3 options. First, October is German-American Heritage Month, so I gave students the option to write about their family heritages. Secondly, on October 22, 1938, Chester Carlson invented the first photocopier. He presented it to IBM, RCA, and Kodak, but they rejected it because they didn't see the value in a machine that only made copies. I asked the students to write about their favorite gadget/inventions or about something that they felt needed inventing. And, as always, students could write about anything else that was on their minds.
We had 2 Words of the Day:
preposition -- fr. Latin, prae, "before" and positus, "put or placed" -- the word placed before a noun or pronoun to establish a connection to another noun or a verb.
conjunction -- fr. Latin con, "with," and juncto, "to join together" -- the word used to join other words, phrases, or clauses.
For our Writing portion of the class, we discussed various ways that they might put together a pre-write for their Biography Essay. We discussed mind maps and outlines. Students can do one or the other, or even both. Here are 2 documents that might be helpful: Prewriting Strategies and Pre-Write Tools. Another important aspect of the Biography Essay that I mentioned last week is that it should not simply be a retelling of details, but the students should have an opinion or take a stand on their topics. The whole of their essays should be in support of this stand.
For our Literature section, we partially closed out our book, Animal Farm. Their assignment for this week was to write a character sketch about one of the characters from the book. Using this information that they had compiled, the students were grouped together to come up with a "campaign speech" for their characters. We heard 3 good speeches promoting Boxer, Mollie, and Squealer for president of Animal Farm. Their final assignment for the book is to finish a final exam for the book.
Next week we will be starting our next book: A Christmas Carol. Please bring it to class.
We had another good presentation by students for our Parts of Speech unit. Halle and Eden had a good presentation that explained the types of Nouns. They followed their explanation with a game that included writing sentences on the white board. The homework is in their packets or on Google Classroom. Also on Google classroom is the evaluation for the presentation.
Have a great weekend. Peace to your homes!
Mrs Prichard
Assignments for Next Week
-- Animal Farm Final (GC)
-- Biography Pre-Write
-- Biography Rough Draft
-- Nouns Homework
-- Nouns Evaluation
-- IVAN Review
-- Discussion Question for Biog. Essay
Links for This Week
Class Notes
About the Biography Essay
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