We worked this week and covered a lot of material in class. As always, we started our day with a Quick Write. Yesterday was International Talk Like a Pirate Day (here is the official website and here is a Wikipedia article and here are the Muppets!)
Most of the students were unaware of this notable event. As an
alternative, they could write about super heroes. I look forward to
reading their responses.
This week's Words of the Day included:
valise-- noun -- fr. French, valigia, of obscure origin-
a small piece of luggage that can be carried by hand
autocratic-- adjective -- fr. Greek, autokratis, ruling by oneself-- characteristic of an absolute rule; tyrannical, despotic
unmollified-- fr. Latin, mollificare
, to make soft-- to NOT be pacifed, calmed, or made more temperate.
candid -- fr Latin, candidus, white, shining -- to be
open, frank, sincere
IMPORTANT NOTE:
I had told the students that there would be a test at the end of the
semester for their words of the day. Instead, we will have a test at
the end of second semester for the second semester words. The Words of
the Day will include unusual foreign words and Latin roots.
In connection with the returned homework, we discussed their Final Drafts of their Personal Essays.
As I grade the final drafts, I use a rubric for a more holistic look at
their work. (The rubric is attached and is on this blog post.) For
the first essay, I'm a pretty easy grader. As we progress through the
year, we will use these rubrics to set writing goals and students will
use them to evaluate their own writing. For example, in the Focus
category, students will be thinking about whether their thesis
statements are compelling and thought-provoking or simply a statement
that combines the topic and opinion.
We did not take a lot of time for My Antonia this week. (I wanted to cover a lot of ground with our grammar topics) I checked in with the class about their book projects that they will complete and present at the end of the semester. Some students are planning to work in groups, and some have already come up with individual project ideas. The proposal form is not due until Week 8, so they have time to brainstorm. When they know what they want to do, they should turn in the proposal (with a parent's initials) so that I can OK it. There is some great positive energy about these projects, and I'm looking forward to seeing what they produce.
We spent the remainder of the time in Grammar discussion. I've had the students do work sheets for Parts of Speech review, and we briefly discussed these. Every word in every sentence falls into one of these categories: interjections, verbs, adjectives, nouns, conjunctions, adverbs, pronouns, and prepositions. When we are correcting or revising our own writing, we need to know what parts of speech might be causing problems. Likewise, many parts of speech do the work of other parts of speech in a sentence, sometimes making grammatical structures more confusing. (e.g. the verb "swimming" would be doing the work of a noun in this sentence: Swimming is my favorite sport.)
Following our parts of speech review, we discussed the basic construction of a sentence, and I'm including some photos of "equations" that I use to explain sentence elements.
A common writing error that students make is to think that dependent clauses are independent clauses because they have a noun and a verb. However, because the clause began with a subordinating conjunction, it loses its sentence status and is not a "complete thought." Another common error is to omit the comma before the conjunction in a compound sentence. If you feel confused, it's because grammar can be awfully confusing and is not as straightforward as we would wish.
A common writing error that students make is to think that dependent clauses are independent clauses because they have a noun and a verb. However, because the clause began with a subordinating conjunction, it loses its sentence status and is not a "complete thought." Another common error is to omit the comma before the conjunction in a compound sentence. If you feel confused, it's because grammar can be awfully confusing and is not as straightforward as we would wish.
Assignments for Next Week
-- Read pages 94 - 118 of My Antonia
-- 3 Reader Responses
-- 5 Vocabulary Words
-- My Antonia book project -- proposal due Week 8
-- FANBOYS worksheet
Links for This Week
Class Notes
Have a great weekend!
Blessings,
Mrs. Prichard
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