Writing 1: Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 9 (March 25)

Greetings!

It was a beautiful day outside and a fun learning day inside.

Our Quick Write this week included prompts from the students themselves:

If you could start a business or company, what would it be?
What kinds of hairstyles do you like or not like?
If you could change your name, what would it be?
What were the highs and lows of this past week?

For our Words of the Day were feline and canine inspired. One of my favorite books, The Play of Words by Richard Lederer, has fun lists of words, including words that start with "cat" and "dog." Our words included catastrophe, category, catacombs, doggerel, dogma, dog-tired, dog-fight, and dog-tags.

Students have handed in the Final Drafts of their Examples/Analogy Essays. We're now ready to start our final "from scratch" essay. (Following this essay, students will complete a re-write of an earlier written essay and a short reflection paper.) This next writing assignment is a News Story. We talked about the differences between an essay and a news story. For a news story, writers give out the broad, general information and progress to more details. Journalists are aware that readers could stop reading at any point (or not be interested enough to turn the page and finish the story.) Students can write a factual news story, a news story about some historical event, a fictional news story, a movie/theater review, or a review of something else that would be news-worthy. The rough draft and pre-write are due April 15.

Following the writing discussion, we briefly covered our two O. Henry stories: "Retrieved Reformation" and "The Pimienta Pancake." The students had some good insights and comments on the humor of these stories. Next week we will read "The Ransom of Red Chief." In the links section below are some videos and an audio version of the story. (And there's a chance we'll have a quiz next week. Just FYI.)

We continue to work on sentence patterns and sentence elements for our Grammar instruction. Last week and this week we practiced identifying direct objects and indirect objects. We worked on the worksheets during class in case there were any questions. If not finished, they are due next week.

Assignments for Next Week