Greetings!
We began class this week, as usual, with a Quick Write. This week's prompt was inspired by the fact that it was National Cheese Pizza. I asked the students to write something pizza related. As they shared their responses, they expressed their opinions about square pieces over triangular pieces, thin crusts vs. thick crusts, and the important question regarding the appropriateness of pineapple on pizza.
Our Words of the Day were contributed by students and selected from this week's reading of My Antonia:
supercilious-- adjective, fr.Latin superciliosis, "above the eye" -- haughtily disdainful or contempuous
docile-- adjective, fr. Latin, docere, "to teach" -- easily managed or handled; teachable
from-- preposition, fr. Old High German, fram, "from" -- used to specify a specific starting place
Most of the time while the students are writing their Quick Writes I am passing out completed homework, and we follow the Word of the Day work with any questions pertaining to the homework. This week we followed our beginning of class work with the Writing portion of the class. Whenever I hand back rough drafts of essays, I take a good portion of the class to go over common errors in their writing. In my classes I have students label a page "Watch Out For," and under this title they are to list the items that I noted on their corrected rough drafts. We will use this list to develop writing goals as the year progresses. This week we talked about contractions, conjunctions, sentence fragments, subject-verb agreement, and the word "things." For next week, students are to make corrections on their rough drafts so that they can hand in their finished final drafts of their Personal Commentary Essays.
For the literature portion of the class, the students broke into their Literature Circles to discuss My Antonia. As they read through the assigned portion of the book, students were to prepare for their individual roles: Discussion Director, Illustrator, Luminary, Word Nerd, Connector, and Summarizer. I sat in on each of the four groups and heard good comments about their reading. The value of these structured small groups is that everyone has to participate in order for the groups to be successful. The circles also give a structure and framework to help the students with academic talk. We will continue to use these circles throughout the semester.
As the students were in their groups, I handed out packets of a parts of speech review for them to do. I had originally planned to start a Grammar section on sentence construction, but decided to use this review of packet instead of taking time from their literature circles. As they work through the packet, they will notice a few items: 1) they have already done the sections for Nouns, Pronouns, Adjectives, and Adverbs; 2) the header says Writing 1; and 3) there is a typo on the Adjectives section. Students only need to do the sections for Verbs, Interjections, Prepositions, and Conjunctions.
Assignments for Next Week
-- Extra Credit -- Bring to class information about the origins of the Oxford Comma
-- Final Draft of Personal Commentary Essays
-- Read p. 47 - 69 of My Antonia
-- 3 Reader Responses (either study guide questions or ala carte)
-- 5 Vocabulary Words
-- Parts of Speech Packet (see notes above)
Links for This Week
Class Notes
Blessings,
Mrs. Prichard
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