We had a great class yesterday. The tables had been put back into the U-shape that we used at the beginning of the year. The challenge with this arrangement is that students can more easily distract one another.
Our Quick Write prompts came from the National Days for March 1: National Peanut Butter Lovers/ Minnesota/ Pig/ Horse Protection/ and "Dadgum that's Good" Day. The other option was inspired by the March 2 birthday of Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss).
Our Words of the Day were chosen by a student from my book of foreign words and phrases:
nada -- Spanish, "nothing" -- informal, colloquial "nothing"
wienerschnitzel -- German, Wiener, "from Vienna," schnitzel, "to cut, scrape" -- a breaded veal cutlet, sometimes used to refer to a German sausage
herpes -- Greek, herpein, "to creep;" Latin herpes "shingles" -- a viral disease caused by a virus that infects tissues and the nervous system
After our beginning of class activities, we looked over the homework that I had handed back. One piece was of particular interest -- the list of finished and/or missing assignments with scores. If an assignment had a zero, it is too late to hand it in unless a student had been absent due to an illness. If an assignment hasn't been handed in but is still within the allowed time, I wrote the "last chance date" on it. As of yesterday, My GradeBook was up to date with all assignments. If you have any questions about scores or homework, please don't hesitate to send an e-mail.
About our Mystery Stories -- I had such a great time reading the final drafts of their stories. I would like to post the stories on the blog. You can check out last year's stories on the sidebar of the class's blog.
We talked at length about their next essays, their Cause/Effect or Problem/Solution Essays. The Pre-Write was to be done for this week, but some students were still having a hard time finding a topic. We shared our topics, so I hope some students got some ideas from their classmates. The Rough Drafts along with the pre-writes are due next week.
I broke the class into small groups to discuss the Short Stories. After a few minutes, I had the students re-group and discuss other stories. It was pretty apparent that some of the students had not read the stories or done the homework. I suggested that some teachers might give pop quizzes if they suspect students are not doing their work. I'm just sayin' . . .
For Grammar, we worked again on compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences. They have two worksheets to do.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read the short stories by Hawthorne (p. 73); Bierce (p.10), Poe (p. 156)
-- Write 3 discussion questions for 2 of the stories
-- Rough Draft of Cause/Effect or Problem/Solution Essay
-- Complex Sentences #3
-- Complex Sentences #4
Links for this Week
Class Notes
Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Prichard
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