Greetings!
My apologies for being so late with this e-mail. The weather's been so nice that I high-tailed it out to my yard and garden for the past few days.
Nonetheless, I have a good update on last week's class. We began the class with a
Quick Write. This week's writing prompt was inspired by the anniversary of the 1860 Pony Express ride from St. Joseph to Sacramento. I had the class list as many means of communication that they could think of. We compiled the list on the white board. Our list included smoke signals, Morse code, semaphore, cryptology, Face Time, etc.
Latin Roots of the Day:
magna -- L. great, big -- English derivatives: magnify, magnum, magnitude, magnet, magnanimous, magnificent
male -- L. bad, evil -- English derivatives: malcontent, malice, malicious, malign, dismal, malapropism
medi -- L. middle -- English derivatives: middle, medium, median, mediocre, Medieval, Mediterranean
migri -- L. wander, move -- English derivatives: immigrant, migrate, emigrate, transmigration, migraine
I handed back the
Rough Drafts of their
News Stories this week. I took a large portion of the class time to go over common errors found in their papers. Two very common problems found in their essays are not necessarily grammatical errors, but weak writing techniques. The first is the use of the word "
things," probably the most general and vague word that means both everything and nothing. I usually underline or circle the word and direct the students to find a better word.
The other writing issue is with the sentence construction using "there is" or "there (and any other form of the verb to be)." While not grammatically incorrect, this type of sentence usually end up overly wordy and passive. This type of sentence postpones the subject of the sentences and the "there is" serves as a placeholder for the real subject of the sentence. For this reason, this is called an "Expletive Construction" because the words are empty phrases that can be replaced with meatier, more concise words. Some websites that further explain this: Purdue OWL, University of Houston, and Grammar Girl's Tips.
We also reviewed some of our comma rules in readiness of our end of the year grammar test. We've looked at a few other bits of punctuation the past two weeks, but the bulk of the work this semester has been commas. I gave the class a comma review worksheet to do as homework.
We did not take time to go over our literature for the week. In a couple of weeks we will do a poetry presentation, so the students should read through their poetry books to choose a poem to read.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- No extra Poetry
-- Look through the poetry book for a poem to present
-- Finish the Final Draft of the News Story
-- Finish the "Mastering the Comma Review" worksheet
This Week's Links
Class Notes
Enjoy the week!
Mrs. Prichard
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