We had a great class today. Students were engaged and we covered a lot of material.
Our Quick Write the morning was in honor of tomorrow's birthday of Johnny Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, who was born in 1744. The students could either write about their favorite way to eat apples OR they could make up a story about someone's seed-sowing adventure. Someone wrote about Nan who planted nectarines, another mentioned a money tree, and someone else wrote of Jimmy Crabapple, Johnny's little-known cousin.
Below are the Words of the Day, brought to us by Connor, Jaden, Joe, and Taylor:
Ossifying -- fr. Latin, ossis, bone -- to become rigid or inflexible in habits, opinions, attitudes, etc.
Declivity -- fr. Latin, de + clivitas, down + slope -- a downward slope, as of ground
Dolorous -- fr. Latin, dolor, grief, pain -- feeling or expressing great sorrow, pain or distress
Impious -- fr. Latin impius, without reverence -- not pious or religious, lacking reverence for God.
I handed back a number of papers, including study guide questions, Quick Writes, grammar worksheets, and the Final Drafts of their Personal Essays. I used a rubric for the essays. If you look at it (attached to this e-mail) you'll see that the papers were evaluated in four areas (Focus, Content, Organization, and Mechanics) and at four levels (Beginning Developing, Proficient, and Advanced) Since this was our first paper of the year and almost half of the students are new to my way of grading, I was generous in my scores. To be honest, scores don't mean a lot when writing because so much of the evaluation is subjective. What's most important is that students are learning and using skills in order to grow with each writing assignment.
After talking through the rubric, I took time to discuss the Focus section, in particular the thesis, introduction, and conclusion. We reviewed my equation for the thesis statement and talked about the elements that need to be included in the intros and conclusions. This is somewhat familiar material for the students, but review never hurts.
I accidentally gave the students the Grammar worksheets that I had set out for Writing 1 rather than the pile for Writing 2. The mistake wasn't discovered until names had been put on papers, and some had started on the worksheets. The lesson was on nouns and pronouns. Since I had planned to cover this material later in the semester, we went ahead and learned about types of nouns and noun/pronoun agreement. They are to do the worksheet (2-9).
With the remaining time in class, I read aloud the portion of ACY in which Hank "breaks the spell" over the broken well. Members of the class mentioned that Hank was a bit self-serving and took advantage of others for his gain and reputation.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read Ch. 24 - 27 in ACY
-- Write out answers to 4 Study Guide questions and do 8 vocabulary words.
-- Complete the Noun/Pronoun Worksheet
This Week's Blogs:
Class Notes
Have a great weekend. The weather is supposed to be wonderful. Enjoy!
Mrs. Prichard
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