Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 10 (March 31)

Greetings!

Another great day!!

Here are our prompts for the Quick Writes:

Prompt #1
On March 24, 1603, Elizabeth I died and King James I was crowned the King of England, and on March 25, 1306, Robert the Bruce was crowned King of Scotland.  How much do you know about the history and rule of other countries?  Is this important knowledge for us to have?  Why?

Prompt #2
On March 26, 1874, American poet Robert Frost, much admired for his depictions of rural New England life and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people, was born in San Francisco.  What are your thoughts about poetry?  Do you like to read it and do you think it’s an important part of our culture?

Prompt #3
Next Week is National Cleaning Week.  How would you describe your cleaning style?  Do you do fall or spring cleaning at your house?  Write about anything cleaning-related.

  

Our Words of the Day from Grace, Megan, Chase, and Ike

anatadaephobia--  the fear that somehow, somewhere, a duck is watching you

cachinnate-- to laugh loudly

venustraphobia-- the fear of beautiful women

boanthropy -- a type of insanity in which people think they are cows

We had a brief check in on their News Stories; the rough drafts are due on March 31.  Some students have given this some thought, and others have waited until next week to work on it.  I reminded them that they could do a news article on a current event, a past event, or even a fictional event.  They could also do a review of some kind.

We had a discussion about our short story "The Ransom of Red Chief" this week.  We agreed that the story was both funny (a boy so bad and mischievous that his family didn't want him back from the kidnappers) and sad (for the same reason).

We are finished with our Short Stories and are now onto Poetry.  To kick off our poetry unit, we played the game Poetry for Neanderthals.  In this game, students give one-word, one-syllable  clues to get their teammates to guess a word.  If they use multi-syllabic words, they get bonked on the head with an inflated club.  (We hit the table instead of one another.)

Class -- please note this next information -- it was not discussed in class

After the students read all of the poems, they are to choose 2 poems to respond to.  They need to respond to 2 poems, and here are their options:

1.  Fill out a Poetry Worksheet for one or both

2.  Write a paragraph about the poem(s) that analyzes the poem; discuss what you think it means and why you like or don't like it.

3.  Instead of writing a paragraph, record a video commentary about the poem.  Youtube LiveStream or some other app on a device is OK as long as it can be seen by me.

4.  Do a piece of art that connects with the content and meaning of the poem.  

5.  Make a video of your recitation of the poem.

Finally, for our Grammar portion of the class, I gave some worksheets for continued practice in identifying sentence elements for the various sentence patterns that have been covered this semester.  

Assignments for Week 11 (April 15)

-- News Story Pre-Write

-- News Story Rough Draft

-- Answer the Question:  Why this Topic?

-- Read Week 11 Poetry 

-- Poetry Response (2 Poems)

-- Complements Worksheet (John Updike)

-- Sentence Patterns (Mr. Jackson)

-- Sentence Patterns Practice (Four bakers)

Links for this Week:  

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 10 (March 24)

Zoom Recording (3/24/2022)

Poetry for Neanderthals

Week 11 Poetry Readings

Tamera M. Prichard

Writing Instructor at CHAT

Writing 1, Writing 2, Writing 3

ACT Prep, British Literature

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 9 (March

Greetings!

We are definitely heading into spring.  I saw some students in shorts and lighter-weight jackets as opposed to the heavier winter apparel.  

Here were the prompts for today’s Quick Write:

• How do you define success?  What would success look like to you in your future?

• What qualities do you see in yourself that you also see in other family members?  How are you alike or not like someone you’re related to?

• Who is someone you admire? Why do you admire this person?  What qualities does this person have that you would like to have?

• What fictional character would you like to meet?  Why? What would you do or talk about?

For our Words of the Day came from our students:

salubrious -- fr. Latin salubris, "promoting health; healthful" -- favorable to health & well-being

androphobia -- fr. Greek andros, "man/men" and phobia "fear" -- a morbid fear of men

snollygoster -- origin attributed to H.W.J. Ham, a member of the 1893 Georgia Legislature -- a shrewd, unprincipled person, especially a politician

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 in 2 weeks on March 31.

After I introduced the next writing assignment, we took some time for a "Jigsaw" activity. In this type of small group work, students are grouped and each group has it's own discussion topic. After they've fully discussed that topic, they are regrouped so that the new groups have someone from each of the specific topics. The overall focus of these small groups was to come up with ideas for overcoming obstacles when writing.

We did not take time to discuss O. Henry's stories, "Retrieved Reformation" and "The Pimienta Pancake." Next week we will read "The Ransom of Red Chief" and discuss all three stories. Instead of a short story worksheet, I've assigned a quiz. I had planned to do this in class, but have posted it in Google Classroom as a form. (Note: this is a closed book quiz.) In the links section below are some videos and an audio version of the story.

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. Their worksheets for this week are again on direct and indirect objects.

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week

• News Story Pre-Write (due 3/31) (Note: this assignment has the chart that was handed out in class.)

• Short Story:  Read The Ransom of Red Chief

• The Ransom of Red Chief Quiz

• Grammar – Wk9:  Nouns as Direct Objects

• Grammar – Wk9:  Compound Direct Objects

• Grammar – Wk9:  Finding Indirect Object

Links for This Week

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 9 (March 17)

About the News Story

The Ransom of Red Chief (audiobook & pdf)

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 8 (March 10)

Greetings!

We are officially over half way through the Spring semester.  I don't know about you, but once we hit daylight savings time and the days get longer, the days also seem to fly by more quickly!

For the Quick Write this week students had 3 options: 

• March 10 is National Pack a lunch Day. Write about your favorite lunches.
• Where is the one place you never want to go to again?
• List 20 of your favorite foods
• And, as always, the "Whatever" option

We had two Words of the Day

apathetic-- fr. Greek, a, "without" and pathos, emotion, feeling -- strabizo, "to squint" -- lack of interest, enthusiasm, concern 

floccinaucinihilipilification -- the action or habit of estimating something as worthless (the link for this 29 letter word is for the pronunciation)

I handed back the rough drafts of the Examples or Analogy Essays that the students had written.  As part of our writing/grammar instruction, I covered common errors in the papers.  For this round of essays, these were the topics: the word "things," comma placement, comma splice sentences, and page format.  The final drafts are due next week.  In addition to the final draft, students are to fill out a form for their first 5 and last 5 mistakes on their rough drafts.

We have read two more Short Stories:  "Makes the Whole World Kin" and "The Furnished Room."  The first story is about a burglar who makes an uncommon connection with the man he's robbing, and that is the one that we talked about.  O. Henry's stories are full of unexpected twists and endings.  We had an in-class quiz about the first story.  

For the Grammar portion of our class, we are continuing to review sentence patterns.  This week, we are "building" sentences that follow the N-V-N (S-V-DO) and N-V-N-N (S-V-IO-DO) patterns, so we discussed transitive verbs, direct objects, and indirect objects.  We had time in class to work on our worksheets.

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week:

• Examples/Analogy  Final Draft

• First Five/Last Five Mistakes

• Short Stories:  Read Retrieved Reformation & The Pimienta Pancake worksheets

• Grammar – Wk8:  Sentence Patterns N-V-N

• Grammar – Wk8: Sentence Patterns N-V-N-N

Links for This Week

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 8 (March 10)

Short Stories: Audio and Pdf versions of Retrieved Reformation & The Pimienta Pancakes

Tamera M. Prichard

Writing Instructor at CHAT

Writing 1, Writing 2, Writing 3

ACT Prep, British Literature

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 7 (March 3)

Greetings!

It was so good to see the students; including our week off and the week my son subbed for me, it's been 3 weeks since I've seen their smiling faces. 

Below are our Quick Write prompts for the day.  

• Tuesday, March 1, is National Minnesota Day!!  What do you like the most about Minnesota?  What might you say to convince someone to move to or at least visit Minnesota?  If you were to have visitors from a far away place come to Minnesota, what sights would you like them to see?
• Wednesday, March 2, is World Teen Mental Health Day.  What does it mean to be mentally healthy?  What do you do to be mentally healthy?  How do you help others who might be struggling with their own mental health?
• Friday, March 4, is National Grammar Day  (It’s “imperative” that we “march forth” on this day!)  Write either a rant or a praise about what you think of this system for understanding language and communicating with one another.

We usually do a quick Homework Check between our beginning of class activities and instruction.  Students can hand in their work for this week when they come to class next week.  With the exception of their rough drafts.  Those should be finished and put on the Google Classroom assignment for the Examples/Analogy Rough Draft. 

Speaking of the Examples/Analogy Rough Draft, we took some time for each student to share about their topics.  This in one of the harder essays that the students will write this year.  Students feel challenged to come up with topics that fit the Examples or Analogy framework.

We talked about two of our O. Henry Short Stories this morning.  O. Henry is a lovely writer -- he has a crisp, clear writing story, throws in some unusual words to spice things up, and often includes surprise twists at the end.  It seemed, however, that a number of the students had not read the stories.  When that happens, I often find a good "pop quiz" is in order.  

Our Grammar lesson was a review of linking verbs and predicate complements.  Students have two worksheets on Google Classroom to practice identifying those sentence elements.  

Have a great weekend.  

Blessing,

Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week

• Short Stories:  Read Makes the Whole World Kin & The Furnished Room

• 2 Short Story Worksheets

• Grammar – Wk7:  Predicate Adjectives

• Grammar – Wk7:  Predicate Complements

Links for This Week

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 7 (March 3)

Quick Write (3/12)

"Makes the Whole World Kin" & "The Furnished Room" audio