Writing 2: Writing 2 Class Notes -- Week 2 (January 28)

Greetings!

We started today with a Quick Write using prompt options that they had written:

What is your favorite musical?
Who is your favorite Veggie Tales character?
Do you think college is worth it?

Our Words of the Day were chosen randomly from the students' contributions:

floccinaucinihilipilification-- from Latin flocci, nauci, nihili, pili (words meaning ‘at little value’) + -fication -- the action or habit of estimating something as worthless (Thank you, Ellie, for this word.)

consecotaleophobia -- the fear of chopsticks (Thank you, Jesse, for this word.)

[Note: I reminded the students that they can bring 1 word each week for extra credit as long as they have the etymology and definition.]

The usual Agenda for the class time is to do these beginning of class activities and then most of the time we cover these topics in this order: Writing assignments/instruction, Literature discussion, and Grammar instruction/work. My plan is to give the last 10 - 15 minutes of every class to working on Grammar assignments so that if students have questions, they can ask them right in class.

For our Writing discussion, I checked in with them about the progress of their Mystery Stories. The Pre-Writes and Rough Drafts are due next week. We discussed for a bit how writing this story will take a different kind of planning. Students are thinking about putting in clues and even red herrings. I am really looking forward to reading their stories next week! By the way, if students want to read some student-written stories, they can go to the Writing 2 blog, and the stories are listed on right hand margin.

The class has read the first 2 stories from our book, Six Great Sherlock Holmes Stories. I had cued a video of "A Scandal in Bohemia" (an 1984 version with Jeremy Brett) to watch a couple of scenes. In addition to that video, YouTube has a number of episodes from this Sherlock Holmes series. We talked about some of his deductions. They are to read 2 more stories for next week. [Note: Below I have links to videos and audio books for some of our Holmes stories.]

The last part of class was for Grammar instruction. Today, I did a short lesson on simple and compound subjects and predicates along with compound sentences. I often use fairly simple sentences to illustrate the concepts, but then we take these concepts and apply them to the students' own writing. Then the students had time to work on the worksheets and ask questions. Some of them got a lot of work done during that time.

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

Mrs. Prichard

Homework for Next Week:

Mystery Story Essay Rough Draft

Mystery Story Pre-Write

Holmes: Read “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” & “The Engineer’s Thumb”
Answer 4 questions for one of the two stories

Commas and Coord Conjunctions

Is it a Compound Sentence?

Writing Compound Sentences

Links for this Week

Class Notes