Wednesday, 2/4/2009

AP ENGLISH

Frankenstein

We reviewed the vocabulary in a fun-filled game called Stand-Up-Until-You-Get-An-Answer-Right.  A good time was had by all.

Looking at Literature

• We had already read and highlighted Professor Foster's chapter, "It's More Than Just Rain or Snow," so we discussed what we saw as the main points.
  

Writing Workshop

• Shelby let us put her essay up on the Big Screen, and we reviewed it, using the AP Writing Rubric.
  

Critical Approaches

• We broke into eight groups, and each group took one of the approaches from page F7 or F8.  We spent the last fifteen minutes of class reading the definitions and figuring out (in our own minds and words) what the approach entailed.  We'll continue looking at these approaches (and how they might be used as lenses to look at Frankenstein) tomorrow.
  

Homework

• Read "the Dangers of Reading Fiction" on page 30.  
  
• In your RJ, answer the questions 1, 2, 3 and 3--yes, I put two #3s on there.  :-)
  

CREATIVE WRITING

Organization

• We spent the first few minutes of class logging pieces into our folders, saving things in the right folders online, and printing WE #7.
  

Writing Lesson

• Connotation versus Denotation
  
• We talked about the word "booger", how it has a dictionary meaning (denotation), but also a connotation, the baggage or emotions associated with a given word.
  
• We talked at length about the word "overweight" and its various synonyms.  
  
• We worked on What Are You Suggesting? as a class and did the first five pairs of words.  Then we got into pairs and came up with the other ten pairs of words.  We shared them when we were done.
  

Workshop Time

• We had fifteen minutes left to work on the Death of Language (twenty words to save).
  

Homework

• Type up ten of your words and reasons for saving them; you can type the other ten tomorrow night, since the whole list is due when you walk in on Friday.
  

TURBO-ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING

Writing Lessons

• We talked a little bit about connotation/denotation (review from yesterday).  For some practice, we typed our version of the passage on the Connotation Revision page.  We saved them on the student volume, and we'll take a look at them tomorrow.
• I called people back one at a time to read their Paragraph-to-Poem pieces, and we talked a bit about which one people thought was stronger, and why.
  

Balderdash

• We split into pairs (and a trio) and created fake definitions (that were supposed to sound authentic and plausible).  Andrew, Rikki and Japonicia reigned supreme.
  

Big Screen Sharing

• We read a few of the Persona Poems and commented on them.  We'll read the rest tomorrow.
  

Homework:  None