Writing 2: Writing 2 Class Notes -- Week 1 (January 13)

Greetings!

It was good to be back in the classroom and to see everyone's smiling faces.

For our Quick Write today, students had 3 options: 1) On January 12, it was National Hot Tea Day, and students could write about their experiences with tea; 2) Yesterday, January 13, is National Stickers Day, and students could write about sticker collections or uses for stickers; and 3) Today, January 14, is National Take a Missionary out to Lunch Day, and students could write about a missionary they know.

We did not have any Words of the Day, but students can bring them to class for us to enjoy. (And get some extra credit, too.) For the rest of the semester, students can bring in interesting words for our weekly Words of the Day part of our discussion. For these words, they also need to include the etymology and a definition.

The first topic we covered was our first Writing assignment -- a Mystery Story. This is one of my favorite assignments of the whole year. Every year students come up with such creative and clever stories. We talked at length about what made for a good mystery, and one student offered some good advice, which is to start the mystery from the end. In other words, know how it will resolve and work backwards. If you go to the CHAT Writing 2 blog, you will find on the right side-bar some stories from previous years. The Pre-Write and Rough Draft are due in 2 weeks on January 27.

Next on the agenda was our first book for the semester. This semester we will be reading 6 Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Many are familiar with the BBC show Sherlock, which takes some of the original stories and gives them a 21st century interpretation. In our pre-reading discussion we discussed the elements for a detective novel. I'm looking forward to hearing their impressions of the original stories. [NOTE: Most of these stories can be found as audioversions on Youtube or Librivox. Feel free to listen to the stories.]

Last semester in the Grammar portion of the class we covered types of phrases, including verbal phrases. This semester, we will be all about the comma (and a few other bits of punctuation. I find that to fully understand comma rules, a writer must understand basics about other facets of sentence writing. In other words, I'm using the comma as an avenue to teach other aspects of grammar. As with last semester, students must correct their own worksheets and hand them in with corrections. I must see clear evidence of that, or the assignment will get a zero.

Glad to be back in the classroom with these great students! See you all next week!

Have a great weekend!

Blessings,

Mrs. Prichard

Assignments for Next Week

-- Read "The Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Redheaded League"

-- 4 Study Guide Questions

-- Spring Writing Survey

-- Start working on the Mystery Story