In class today, we started, as usual, with a Quick Write. For this week, I pulled the prompts from the National Days Calendar. March 4 was National Grammar Day; March 5 was National Cheese Doodle Day; and March 6 is National Day of Unplugging. Students could write about their love or hate of grammar, about their favorite cheese snacks, or about their use of technology to entertain themselves or waste time.
Our Words of the Day dealt with fears. I've been using a book by Richard Lederer, Crazy English, for some of our words. The Greek root phobia means "fear"
acrophobia -- fr. Greek, akron, tip, heights -- a fear of high places (by the way, the word "acrobat" has the same root, akron)
nyctophobia -- fr. Greek nux, "night" -- a fear of darkness or night
ombrophobia -- fr. Greek ombros, "storm or rain" -- fear of rain or storms (by the way, the word "umbrella" also has the same root.)
phengophobia -- origin unknown -- fear of daylight
basophobia -- fr. Latin bas, base -- a fear of falling; a fear of standing
arachibutyrophobia -- a fear of getting peanut butter stuck on the room of your mouth
And one more
hippopotomonstrosesquippedalio
After our beginning of class activities and a check in on the homework that was passed back, the class took a quiz on our short stories for this week. As we corrected the quiz in class, we discussed the stories. The quiz was not difficult, but it gave me an opportunity to see if they had read and understood the stories. We had a short discussion following the quiz about being accountable to our work as students. About this time of year, students have a tendency to ease up on the diligence that they had at the beginning of the year. With that in mind, I will have My GradeBook updated later in the week so that students can check their work, especially for missing work.
Next week they are to read the stories by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Stephen Crane. They are to do one worksheet.
Students handed in their rough drafts for the Cause/Effect and Problem/Solution essays. I will go over those this week, but for next week they are to bring 2 paragraphs from their rough drafts. One paragraph should be their introduction and the other can be any other paragraph in the paper. Next week we will divide up into Writing Circles to share the paragraphs with one another.
For our Grammar discussion, we are again continuing to work with commas. IN the previous weeks we've discussed commas with compound sentences, complex sentences, and non-restrictive clauses/phrases. This week, we're working with the serial/series/Oxford comma.
Have a wonderful weekend. Weather looks great, so enjoy!
Mrs. Prichard
Assignments for Next Week
-- Read the following short stories: Harte
(p. 64); Twain (p. 175); Jewett (p. 87); Crane (p. 34)
-- Short Stories Worksheet
-- Grammar Worksheets: Series Comma worksheet (both sides)
-- Bring 2 paragraphs, including the introduction paragraph
Links for This Week
Class Notes
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