Another great week! The students came in ready to engage well in our class work.
Our Quick Write this week was inspired by a simple problem that I had getting ready this morning -- I couldn't find my shoes! I asked the students to write about their own personal organization preferences. I put a line on the board to represent a continuum from "Walking Tornado" to "Obsessively Organized." Most students considered themselves Average, which was right in the middle. I also collected some great ideas from the students to help us all be more on tip of the details of life.
Our Words of the Day were again Latin roots:
bene -- Latin," good" -- derivatives: benefit, benefactor, beneficiary, benevolent, benign
belli -- Latin, "war" -- derivatives: bellicose, casus belli, antebellum, belligerent, rebellious
brevi -- Latin, "short" -- derivatives: brief, briefcase, abbreviation, brevity
The next order of business was to discuss our writing assignment, which is a Mystery Story. The Pre-Write for this should be done for this week, and the rough draft is due next week. We spent some time to talk through some of the differences between writing an essay and writing a short story. While it is important to start a story well, students don't need write introductions and conclusions as they would in an essay. Stories also develop more slowly than essays. We had a variety of "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" and "thumbs side-ways." They need to think a little differently for this kind of writing. The challenging points could be incorporating clues, coming up with motives, and avoiding sounding stupid. I have great faith in this creative group.
I took some time to walk through the format for the essays. The essays should be double-spaced and have 1-inch margins. The font can be either Arial or Times New Roman and 12-point. Another topic I covered was Headings and the Header. The Heading needs to have the students name, teacher's name, name of the class, the assignment, and the date. The Header is in the upper right margin and should be the student's last name and the page number. Below in the links portion, I have a link to a Google document that shows what the papers should look like.
We then dove into our reading selections about Sherlock Holmes. We read aloud from the portions of the story, "The Scandal in Bohemia," which featured Irene Adler, the one person who got the best of Sherlock Holmes. We read various parts that highlighted Holmes observation and deductive skills. A number of students hadn't gotten all of the way through the stories. A reminder -- you enjoy a class discussion more if you've read the material.
Finally, we talked Commas. Last week we discussed commas and compound sentences. After a quick review, we progressed to commas and complex sentences. This is a harder topic because students have to understand dependent and independent clauses in addition to identifying subordinating conjunctions. Students have two worksheets to practice inserting commas into sentences. I have some links below that might be helpful.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read "The Adventure of the Speckled Band" and "The Engineer's Thumb"
-- Answer 4 questions
-- Rough Draft of Mystery Story
-- Commas & Complex Sentences Worksheet
-- Sentences & Commas Worksheet
-- FANBOYS Worksheet
--EXTRA CREDIT -- bring a list of subordinating conjunctions
Links for this week:
Class Notes
Have a wonderful weekend!
Mrs. Prichard
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