Hello Everyone!
Time flies when you are having fun–and it sure flew once again today in Writing 1. Read on for a recap of all we accomplished in class today!
Quick Write
Because we are coming up on Holy Week, I pivoted. We had another Quick Write responding to an allegorical animated short film that beautifully parallels the sacrifice, the death, and resurrection of Jesus and what that means for us. The best stories convey truth— I pray students will internalize the truth of God’s great love for us.
Visual Vocabulary
Our words for today were big “feelings words”: laconic & ebullient. The former means sparse or few words, while the latter means lively or enthusiastic. When I feel ebullient, I am seldom laconic–I usually talk a lot!
Literature
We finished our O. Henry short stories unit with a short discussion. After they had thoroughly discussed, they were also to come to a consensus on this question: What was your opinion on “The Ransom of Red Chief”? It was interesting to discuss because the story was both funny (about a boy so bad and mischievous that his family didn't want him back from the kidnappers) and sad (for the same reason).
After the discussion, I handed out their new books: Great Short Poems. This is an anthology of short verse that spans 400 years of English and American literary history. Students have the books, but I will also post the poems on Google Classroom.
We talked about how each week from here on out students will read all the assigned poems and respond to two of them.
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. Our poetry unit will culminate in a Poetry Jam (poetry contest.) More details on that to come.
Writing
Last week I introduced our last “from scratch” essay–the Formal Critique. The KWO for that was due today. I circulated around the room, checked in with each student and gave credit to those who met their deadline for this assignment. After that, we talked through some more helps for this essay. I passed out a two sided-sheet with a “thesaurus” for writing this type of essay and more helpful vocabulary for discussing topics like themes, character qualities and general analysis words. These are posted in the About the Formal Critique material on Google Classroom. Please avail yourself of these helps when writing your essays over the break. You’ll sound as smart as you are! The Formal Critique is due April 9th–when you get back from break.
To further support you as students write their critiques, today we watched a video on Story Types. We learned there are basically 4 types of stories: whole, healing, broken, and twisted. After generating a few more examples of each story type, we read through the famous short story “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Anderson. It was SO sad! Though we didn’t have time to finish in class, when you finish at home over break, you will see that it is a great example of a healing and a broken story. It was healing because there was redemption for the Little Match Girl in heaven, but also broken because it is a cautionary tale of what happens when we harden our hearts to those in need. Familiarity with story types will be helpful as they write their critiques.
Grammar
Last,I gave three worksheets for continued practice in identifying sentence elements for the various sentence patterns that have been covered this semester. Make sure to correct your own work!
That’s all for now, folks.
Blessings on you!
Mrs. G
Assignments for Week 11
–Formal Critique (due 4/9)
-- Read Week 11 Poetry (PDFs on Google Classroom)
–Raleigh (p.1); Donne (p.); Quarels (p. 4); Milton (p. 5); Bradstreet (39)
-- Poetry Response (2 Poems)
Grammar
Nouns as Direct Objects
Compound Direct Objects
Finding Direct Objects
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