Writing 1 Class Notes–Week 13 (April 20)

 Hello There!

We had a fast-paced class today as we approach the end of the year.  

As usual, we started the day with a Quick Write, and here are the prompts:

• If your life had a theme song, what song would it be and why?

• If your life was a movie, what would the title be and what genre would it be?  Why? 

• Skittles or M & Ms?  Why?

• If you could design a “National Day” what would it be and why?

The Final Drafts of the A.I Prediction Essays were due today, and I introduced the next writing assignment, which is an Essay Re-Write.  For this essay, students can choose any essay they have written this year for Writing 1, or they can choose an essay that they've written for another class.  They should take one of their final drafts and look for ways to improve it.  I often suggest that students choose the essay that they got the worst grade on or that they want to spend some more time on. This writing assignment is due next week, and students should hand in the original along with the re-write.  (Note:  This isn't our regular pre-write to rough draft to final draft process.)

To conclude our Grammar for the year, I have a Final Sentence Patterns Test that they will take next week.  For this week, they have a review sheet that they should complete and then correct. (The Key is on the Google Classroom assignment.)  Correcting their own work will further help them review and will be much more beneficial than waiting a week to see if they got the answers right.  

For our Literature portion of the class, we spent some of our time talking about the poems from last week’s reading assignment.  I broke the class into groups, and each group focused on a group of assigned poems.They discussed the highlights (and lowlights) and then each group shared their insights. 

After that, students had the opportunity to try their hands at writing some original poetry.  We watched a video of local poet Rudy Francisco perform a piece called “My Honest Poem” and then read an example based on his performance.  Students had time in  class to compose their own “My Poem” based on the examples.  I could tell some really got into “the zone” writing these and my hope is to hear some of these performed at our Poetry Event.  

Speaking of the  Poetry Event, which will be the last day of class , we spent the rest of the class getting into more details about this project.  It takes a lot of work to put on an event like this, and to split up the labor,  each student signed up for a role on a committee.  Their grade on this project will depend on not only their poetry performance techniques, but also how well they worked as a group.  

We have a couple fun weeks planned to finish out our year, so let's make sure you get caught up on any late work.

Assignments for Next Week:

--Choose 2 poems for your contribution to the Poetry Jam (Here is the scoring/committee information)

–Finish composing “My Poem”( if not finished in class)

-- Complete the Essay Re-Write

-- Complete the Sentence Patterns Review sheet and correct it. (Bring the corrected version to class)

Links for This Week

Writing 1 Class Notes -- Week 12 (April 20)