Writing 1: Writing 1 Class Notes

Writing 1 Class Notes–Week 8 (10/24)

It was good to see your smiling faces back from break. We are officially halfway through the Fall semester now. Can you believe it?!?

Class opened with a Door Test on the Topic-Clincher Rule. Memorizing and using this rule helps us to write well-rounded paragraphs. Studies show that using gestures can support memorization; pairing simple actions with words will help this rule stick in our minds. The “test” was simple: after a practice round, students stood up and recited the rule using the actions we learned. They did great!

Since I had a Google Slides malfunction, we had just one Visual Vocabulary word of the day: licentious. Elsa sings a famous song about that. We’ll catch up next round!

Writing

We are continuing our unit on summarizing a reference–laying the groundwork for longer essays later in the year. Last week, the assignment was a two paragraph summary on a reference about Elon Musk and those were due today. Since the teaching was sent out as a set of short videos, we had a progress check-in. They should have incorporated all five of the dress-ups and the new topic-clincher rule.

After that, we had a mini-lesson introducing Sentence Openers. We will have six this year and the first one is sentence opener two: the prepositional sentence opener. As the name suggests, this sentence begins with a preposition or prepositional phrase. An example:

[2] In sentence openers, the indicator is a number in brackets before the sentence.

Students got a hand out on that opener. We took a few minutes to write a few practice sentences.

No writing assignment this week–just catch up on any late work. I will be sending out grade reports before next class, so use this time wisely! Next week, we’ll practice summarizing with a little longer assignment and incorporate this sentence opener.

Grammar

Before our next Grammar presentation, we had a short seque. I find that students are surprised that adjectives are much more than simply “descriptive words.” They took some notes and did some practice that will help them to take their IVAN Review Google Forms quizzes that are due next week.

We're continuing with the Parts of Speech presentations, and today we had the Nouns group. They had a game for the students to play and a worksheet. We watched a short video about nouns and they have homework to practice identifying nouns. (A reminder: students should fill out the evaluation of ALL the presentations we’ve seen so far: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives and Nouns. If you presented, fill out the Self-Evaluation). Here are the next next two groups on deck:

Literature

This is our last assignment for Ender’s Game. Unfortunately, we ran out of time for our Literature Circles Discussion. I collected their role sheet homework and will base their grade on that.

We played a lightning round of a fun review team play game called ZAP! Students are to finish reading chapters 13 & 14 and get ready for the Final Exam next week. I posted the game with answers. I told them that if they studied these questions, they would ace the test we’ll take in class next week!

That’s it! Reach out with any questions.

Blessings,

Mrs. G

Homework

Catch-up on any late writing assignments

Nouns Homework–1

Nouns Homework–2

Nouns Evaluation

IVAN Review Quizzes (open notes)

Interjections

Verbs

Adjectives