Thursday, April 15, 2021

Writing 2 Class Notes -- Week 11 (April 11)

 Greetings!


We had a lovely class this week.  One aspect that I especially enjoy with this Writing 1 class is that they all get along well and participate in a harmonious way.  We have good, productive conversations.

For our Quick Writes, here were their options:
1). If your life had a theme song, what song would it be and why? 2) If your life was a movie, what would the title be and what genre would it be?  Why? 3) Skittles of M & Ms?  Why? and 4) If you could design a “National Day” what would it be and why?

We had some unusual Words of the Day:
xanthophobia -- fr. Greek, xanthos, "yellow;" phobia, "fear" -- the fear of yellow
pentheraphobia -- fr. Greek, penthera, "mother in law"; phobia, "fear" -- a fear of your mother-in-law
tumultuous -- fr. Latin, tumultus, "commotion, bustle" -- a loud uproar
sarcasm -- fr. Latin, sarcasmus, "sneer, taunt"
dunk -- fr. Old German thunkon, "to dip" -- to dip something into a liquid
redhibition -- fr. Latin, rehibitio, "a taking back" -- to return a faulty or damaged product

We had a very short quiz after our Words of the Day.  I asked the students to memorize the state of being words:  am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been.  I had them list the words, and they did a great job.

They have handed in the rough drafts of their Evaluation Essays.  I'm looking forward to reading them; these were probably the most complex essays that they will write this year.  I also asked them today to think about how they've improved as writers.  They shared some insightful comments.

We are now reading poetry for our Literature portion of the class. Some students like poetry, but many aren't that crazy about it.  Today, we watched a couple of videos of poetry recitations.  (See links at the bottom.)  The class has their new poetry books, and they should read the poems of the poets listed below.  We had some delightful poetry reading by the class of a number of Emily Dickinson poems.

For their homework, they need to respond to 2 poems, and the have 5 options:  
1.  Fill out a Poetry Worksheet for one or both
2.  Write a paragraph about the poem(s) that analyzes the poem; discuss what you think it means and why you like or don't like it.
3.  Instead of writing a paragraph, record a video commentary about the poem.  Youtube LiveStream or some other app on a device is OK as long as it can be seen by me.
4.  Do a piece of art that connects with the content and meaning of the poem.  
5.  Make a video of your recitation of the poem.

For our Grammar section of the class, we worked on 2 worksheets for the students to practice some more punctuation:  quotation marks and italics.

Have a beautiful weekend!
Blessings,
Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week:
  • Poetry: Read Harper (27-29), Wilcox (33), Thayer (34-35), Johnson (41), Dunbar (p. 41 – 43)

  • Poetry Packet (2 Poems)

  • Grammar:  Wk12 - Italics & Quotation Marks
  • Grammar:  Wk12 - Using Italics


Links for this Week
Class Notes
2019 Poetry Out Loud Winner -- Bella Callery (from my other school, Arcadia Charter School)



Tamera M. Prichard

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