Writing 2: Writing 2 Class Notes -- Week 9 (March 25)

Thursday, March 25, 2021

Writing 2 Class Notes -- Week 9 (March 25)

Greetings!

It was a beautiful day outside and a fun learning day inside.

Our Quick Write this week included prompts from the students themselves:

If you could start a business or company, what would it be?
What kinds of hairstyles do you like or not like?
If you could change your name, what would it be?
What were the highs and lows of this past week?

For our Words of the Day were feline and canine inspired. One of my favorite books, The Play of Words by Richard Lederer, has fun lists of words, including words that start with "cat" and "dog." Our words included catastrophe, category, catacombs, doggerel, dogma, dog-tired, dog-fight, and dog-tags.

Students have handed in the Final Drafts of their Problem/Solution or Cause/Effect Essays. We're now ready to start our final "from scratch" essay. (Following this essay, students will complete a re-write of an earlier written essay and a short reflection paper.) This next writing assignment is an Evaluation Essay. This writing assignment is one of the more complicated essays that they will write. Firstly, they need to decide what they want to evaluate. We brainstormed some possible topics: cars, movies, teachers, restaurants, books, food items, etc. After they've chosen the topic, they need to decide what qualities of that their topic they will evaluate; in other words, they need to establish criteria. After they've developed their criteria, they need to decide what good likes and what bad looks like. The rough draft and pre-write are due April 15, but it will be helpful for them if they have some ideas about the topics they want to write about.

Following the writing discussion, we briefly covered our four Short Stories assigned for this week. I had the feeling that not everyone had read the stories, and that might be because of some confusion about which stories were assigned. For next week they are to read stories by Kate Chopin, Luigi Pirandello, Guy de Maupassant, and Nella Larsen, but not Katherine Mansfield. (A change for the original list of stories.) And there's a chance we'll have a quiz next week. Just FYI.

We continue to work on punctuation for our Grammar instruction. We've been working on commas, and this week we've looked at periods as end punctuation and for abbreviations. We also have a worksheet for inserting hyphens.

Have a blessed weekend!

Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week