Thursday, 2/5/2009

AP ENGLISH

Homework Due

• RJ for "The Dangers of Reading Fiction"
  

"Home Burial"

• We talked about what your answers should sound like in your Reading Journal--thoughtful, detailed, clear evidence to support your points, and we talked about WHY the RJ is important (preparation for college-level thinking and writing; practice at writing essay-style responses; practice at CLOSE and careful reading, as opposed to skimming and scanning).  We discussed questions 1-3; we'll discuss the rest of the questions tomorrow.
  
• Miranda and Alex read the wife and husband parts of the poem, dialogue only.  We talked a bit about what we noticed when they did that, that we hadn't noticed in our prior readings.
  

Big Screen Writing Workshop

• We looked at Alex's essay, and we commented on it based on the AP Writing Rubric.
  

Frankenstein

• We reviewed the vocabulary words again today.  
  

Critical Approaches (pages F7-F8)

We had about fifteen minutes in our groups to talk and think.  When you present your approach to the class, you have to do three things:

• explain what the approach IS in your own words
  
• use the approach (lens) to look at two aspects of Frankenstein
  
• tell whether or not you feel this approach will be helpful to you in future reading, or if you think it's a bunch of hooey.
  

Homework

• Study the vocabulary for fifteen to twenty minutes.
  
• Read 'The Art of Fiction" on pages 31-32.  Answer the eight Reading Journal questions--due MONDAY.
  

CREATIVE WRITING

What Makes a Poem a Poem?

• We talked about all the ideas you guys came up with in your research.
  
• We put the bad poems up on the Big Screen, and we picked out all the ways the writers and purposefully defied the elements that can make a strong poem (no detail; imprecise words; etc.)
  

Writing Lesson

• We reviewed "connotation" and "denotation".
  
• We discussed how to do the assignment on page 29, Playing with Words, and then we took fifteen minutes or so to complete it.
  
• We got with a partner for five minutes after we'd finished and shared our words.
  

Writing Lesson

• I passed back the pink page about how to create strong titles, and we discussed what can make a strong title.  We also discussed some of the Earthbook pieces people read.
  

Homework

• Death of Language--twenty words
  
• See page 26 in your book--for an "A", your answers have to be as thoughtful and details as the model answers at the bottom of that page.
  

TURBO-ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING

Writing Lesson

• Memoir--I passed out the pages for the memoir unit, and we talked about Zinsser's piece about the art and craft of memoir.  We talked about the importance of being creative and telling a good story, instead of just urping up the events on the page and calling it a story.
  

Writing Assignment

• Childhood Lie OR Childhood Memory--we took twenty-five minutes to type our first draft of this memoir.
  

Post Secret

• We talked about the origins of the Post Secret Postcard.
  
• I showed a slideshow of some sample cards, so everyone could get the general idea of the project.
  

Sharing

• We continued reading and commenting on the persona poems.
  

Organization

• We passed back three writings and logged them into our folders.
  

Homework

• Go to www.postsecret.com tonight, and peruse the postcards there for at least fifteen minutes.  This will help you get ideas for your own postcard.
  
• Bring materials from home to create your postcard.
  
• Bring money for our Kum and Go trip.