We had a good class this week even though I made to take frequent breaks to sneeze or deal with my runny nose. Our Quick Write prompt this week was to finish and elaborate on this sentence: "NEWS ALERT! Writing 2 has a bad case of the ...." For students who are willing, I will put their Quick Writes on the class blog.
Our Words of the Day:
equa/equi -- Latin, "same/even/level" -- equal, equation, equality, equinox, equilibrium, equate, equidistant
ex/e -- Latin, "put out of" -- exclude, exterior, exclaim. excavate, exhale
extri/extra -- Latin, "outer, outside of" -- extricate, extraterrestrial, extract, extraction, extraordinary, extrovert
Students handed in the Final Drafts of their Mystery Stories. If a rough draft was handed in late, I will get it back to them within the week so that the final draft can be brought to class after our break. We are now ready to start our next essay. Students can choose between a Cause and Effect Essay or a Problem/Solution Essay. Both of these are 2-part essays, and the students need to consider which part should receive the most attention. For example, if when writing a Cause/Effect essay, the cause is simple but the results (effects) are more complicated, the focus of the essay should be on the effects.
I handed out their next book for this class: Great Short, Short Stories. I love short stories because they are a microcosm of the key literary elements but are more of a bare-bones sketch than a full, deep picture. Most short stories are either character-driven or plot-driven; few are setting-driven. The assigned stories are listed below.
We took a longer time to work on our Comma studies. As I corrected the worksheets, I saw that we needed some more time to go over subordinate clauses/complex sentences, introductory elements, and items in a series. After a quick review of these topics, I divided the class into groups. Their first assignment was to review as a group to make sure each one of them could explain subordinate/dependent clauses to someone else. We used the rest of the time to work through the other two uses for commas: introductory elements and items in a series.
We do not have class next week, so they have two weeks to do their assignments.
Assignments for March 2:
-- Read the following short stories
-- "The Coffin Maker" by Alexander Pushkin
--"The Three Hermits" by Leo Tolstoy
-- "The Sphinx Without a Secret" by Oscar Wilde
-- "Wee Willie Winkie" by Rudyard Kipling
-- "The Open Windoe" by H. H. Munro
-- Fill in the charts on the two short story worksheets
-- Pre-Write for Cause/Effect or Problem/Solution Essay
-- 3 Comma Worksheets (if not completed in class)
Links for this Week:
Have a great weekend and a lovely break!
Mrs. Prichard
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