Writing 1: Writing 1 Class Notes Week 3 (January 26)

Greetings!

Today’s QuickWrite prompts are taken from the list that the students in Writing 1 and Writing 2 contributed to last fall. Here are the prompts for today’s Quick Write

Where do you see yourself in five years
Write one story you can’t stop yourself from laughing about everytime you think of it.
A time of awkwardness/embarrassment
If you dropped out of school and started a business what would it be
If you could only have three Apps on your phone, what would they be? Why?
Whatever …..

Today we had 3 Words of the Day:

Tenacious: Definition: Qualtiy that does not stop holding something or give up something easily; determined

Etymology: early 17th cent.: from Latin tenax, tenac- (from tenere ‘to hold’) + -ious.

Example: She's a tenacious student. She never gives up.

charisma

Definition: the powerful personal quality that some people have to attract and impress other people

adj=charismatic

Etymology: from Greek kharisma, from kharis ‘favour, grace’.

Example: She relaxed and her natural charisma started to shine through.

benevolent

Definition: (especially of people in authority) kind, helpful and generous

Opposite: malevolent

Etymology: Latin bene volent- ‘well wishing’, from bene ‘well’ + velle ‘to wish’.

Example: The colonel was benevolent, but not stupid.

Students have handed in the Pre-Writes and Rough Drafts of their Narrative Essays. Most of them enjoyed writing these because they could write about personal experiences. I look forward to reading them. Because they may be including dialogue in these essays, we had another mini-lesson on dialogue. This time, we focused on using alternate words to the more common “said,” and “asked.” I asked students to partner up and write a dialogue between our main character Hannay and another character using the alternate words.

Speaking of our main character, we are now 4 chapters into our book, The Thirty-Nine Steps, and most of the students are enjoying the story line. Some aspects are unfamiliar because it was written for another time and place. Doing close reading with Annotations should help with this–asking questions and noting down unfamiliar vocabulary as they go. I divided the class into small groups for a “Silent Discussion.” Each group was given a prompt, a poster sized Post-It note and a Sharpie. They were to discuss the prompt and to reply to other students’ comments. We discussed these 4 prompts: Was Hannay a good or bad spy? The theme “Escape”; Connect the Characters to the Storyline; The themes conspiracy + Good vs. Evil. We watched this 2 minute video about the real life cause of WWI and then broke into groups to silently discuss.

For the Grammar portion of class, we worked again on simple and compound sentences. The worksheets are a review of the basic elements of a sentence (subject + verb + complete thought). Many times students write sentence fragments and run-on sentences and comma splice sentences because they don't have a strong sense for these sentence elements. [Note: Remember to correct your grammar worksheets and to clearly mark that they've been corrected.]

Assignments for Next Week: