As with every week, I have a full agenda for our class period. We started with a Quick Write, which was inspired by the fact that Oct. 24 is the 158th anniversary of the 1st transcontinental telegraph from Justice Stephen Field in California to President Lincoln in Washington, D. C. I asked the students to list as many ways of communicating that they could think of, and we filled the board with our responses.
Our Words of the Day were again unusual words. Some could be decoded because they had familiar word stems, but for the others the students came up with creative definitions:
biblioklept -- fr. Greek, biblio, book; kleptes, thief -- someone who steals books
acnestis -- fr. Greek, knestis, spine -- the part of an animal's skin between the shoulder blades that it usually cannot reach.
octothorpe -- the symbol (#). Note: The origin of the word is disputed. Some say it was a practical joke, and others say that it was named by Bell Laboratories to be used in telephone computing language and was named for the 8 legs of the symbol and for James Thorpe whom the originator admired.
augend & addend -- fr. Latin augendum. to augment; addendus, to be added -- these numbers refer to numbers in an addition equation. The first is the augend, and the second is the addend.
Students received their final drafts of the Process Essays and handed in their pre-writes and rough drafts of their Classification or Extended Definintion Essays. I will go over these and hand them back next week for them to revise.
We had a great discussion about the end of our book, My Antonia. I started by giving them some talking stems so that they could do the work of moving the conversation along without my direct involvement. I have found that most students (and most adults, for that matter) need help in having productive discussions on academic topics. They did a wonderful job, and we closed our work with this book with some thoughtful insights. For the remainder of the semester, we will be reading selections from the prairie genre of literature. Their assignment for next week is to read a portion of the first chapter of O. E. Rolvaag's Giants of the Earth and to highlight landscape descriptions that help set the tone or that are significant to the story. They should also be working on their book projects.
We spent a considerable amount of time this week in Grammar discussion. Most of the class did not do well on the worksheets relating to sentence patterns. I did not do any pre-teaching of this topic, so it gave me a clearer picture of what the students know and don't know. I told them that if they can show me that they understand this material, I will remove that low score. With that incentive, they were pretty engaged as we talked about subjects, predicates, linking verbs, action verbs, predicate nouns, predicate adjectives, direct objects, and indirect objects. I had intended for them to work together on the grammar assignment, but we ran out of time. That assignment is at the bottom of this email.
Note: For a review of the grammar discussion, read the Rocketbook Notes that Alyse took and that are attached below.
Assignments for Next Week:
-- My Antonia Final Exam
-- Ready excerpt from Giants in the Earth, highlighting landscape descriptions that help set the tone or that are significant to the story
-- Grammar Assignment
Links for This Week
Class Notes
SENTENCE PATTERNS WORK (on the blog)
SENTENCE PATTERNS WORK (on Google Docs)
Giants in the Earth (on Google Docs)
Giants in the Earth (on the blog)
Have a great weekend! Enjoy the weather before it turns cold!
Blessings,
Mrs. Prichard
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