Tuesday, 9/15/2009

AP


"Home Burial"

• We got into groups of four for the first ten minutes of class and talked about the questions we asked ourselves about this poem.
• We re-convened as a class to continue those discussions, and we talked about some of the RJ questions as well.
• Tomorrow, Greta and Nolan are going to reading the dialogue only from the poem.

Perrine--The Interpretation of Poetry

• I began reading this dense essay aloud.  I stopped often to talk about what was going on in the essay.  I did this to give everyone a jump-start on a very challenging read.
• For homework tonight, read and ANNOTATE--talk to the text--at least two more pages of Perrine.
• For Thursday, you will need to finish reading and annotating, as well as respond to the five RJ questions.

Poetry Trios

• In groups of threes, we worked with two poems--reading them aloud, figuring out words we didn't know, asking each other questions, and responding to the questions on page 24.
• We'll continue working in trios tomorrow (and Thursday, if necessary), and we'll finish the week by reading all these poems aloud again, then hearing from each trio about their ideas, insights and questions.

Homework

• Perrine (See above.)

READING

• Strategy Instruction--Somebody Wanted But So (summarizing strategy)
• I put the Somebody Wanted But So frame up on the board.  We thought back to the Cisneros chapter we read Friday, "The Monkey Garden", and we discussed who the Somebody was (the narrator), what she wanted (to play in the garden), what the But was (but her friend Sally is growing up), and the So (the narrator leaves the garden and never returns).
• I handed out a template grid for SWBS, and I handed out copies of today's read-aloud, "Those Three Wishes".
• I read aloud, and students followed along.
• After I finished reading the story, people got with a partner and created one SWBS statement that would summarize this story.
• We discussed several of those, and we talked about how even though each summary was different, each one had the key components and was a strong summary of the story.

Read and Relax

• We had thirty minutes to read today.  Most people were reading, and a few people worked on book reports or had book chats with me.

Vocabulary Review

• We spent the last ten minutes of the block reviewing our vocabulary words (fourteen total).