Dear Students,
Today was another full day. The class was engaged and ready to learn–just what I like!
For our QuickWrite today, students had a choice on whether they would like to reflect on their thoughts about Halloween, or if they’d like to try their hand at writing an epitaph. Afterall, it is National Epitaph Day today–as weird as that sounds. They had fun making up a person and writing a few rhyming words to honor them. Here is an example:
Here lies poor Billy.
Although it sounds silly,
he never ate anything green.
The candy that filled him
is also what killed him
the day after last Halloween.
Writing
I have graded and returned the Rough Drafts of Essay 3: Who is This Special Person? Students did a great job on their first pass at honoring someone special. However, I noticed that many RD’s sounded a lot like narrative essays–essays sharing a personal experience. I challenged the class to shift their focus instead to focus on their special person. Instead of simply sharing personal stories and experiences from the student’s own perspective about their person, they should instead write about what ingredients make their person so special. Their Final Draft (due next week) should contain some combination of these elements:
After reading a model Mentor Text essay about my grandfather, students got into groups to discuss the hook, thesis, and roadmap sentence. They also identified transition words and phrases and analyzed the conclusion. Last, we identified the controlling metaphor of the paper.
The Final drafts are due next week along with all the process pieces: Pre-Write, Peer Review, Final draft and Endnotes. I am looking forward to seeing how students incorporate these elements!
Literature
To prepare for our next novella, students read some introductory material and took a quiz over that on Google Classroom as homework last week. I introduced our next novel A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We looked at Mr. Dickens’ original manuscript and read the opening paragraphs.
Interestingly, Dickens has named each of the five chapters of his book “staves”--like the lines on a music staff. There are five lines/staves in musical notation, and there are five chapters. It is a carol (song) afterall! We discussed the fact that though this story might be familiar to most, I want the students to focus on the music of Dickens’ writing as they read. His word usage and sentence structure are masterful!
On that note, (ha!) students have been assigned a Vocabulary Sheet students should be using as they work their way through the book.
Grammar
Instead of squeezing in our Grammar Presentations and rushing through, we decided to have a mega-grammar week next week. The Conjunctions, Adverbs and Pronouns group will all present their lessons next week, so buckle up! No grammar homework this week!
Homework
Links for This Week
Dickens’ A Christmas Carol manuscript
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