Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Wednesday, 12/16

MODERN PROSE
  • We read for about seventy-five minutes.  (Mr. Henry was here as your sub.)

AP


Homework Due
  • Thank-you letter to someone impossible to thank
Sonnets
  • We worked in trios to research the three different kinds of sonnets, and we filled in the comparison/contrast chart for Petrarchan/Italian, Shakespearean/English, and Spenserian.
  • We also compared three poems in the yellow packet and used our Sonnet Characteristics Chart (p. 5) to compare lines, stanzas, rhyme scheme and meter.
Vocabulary
  • We created a story, with each person contributed a sentence with a vocabulary word in it.
Organizational
  • We wrote thank-you notes to Mr. Hoover, Mrs. Kennedy and Tammy for their help during our Animal Farm discussions.
Sharing
  • John, Nick and Brittany shared their thank-you letters with us.  They were terrific!  :-)
Homework
  • Study for tomorrow's vocabulary quiz.
  • Work on your sestina, which is due Friday.


CREATIVE WRITING
Focus for the week:  show, don't just tell!


Homework Due
Writing Experiment #? :-)


Alliteration
  • We took some notes on page 56, and we talked about how different letters have different suggestive sounds--some make hard sounds, and some make soft sounds.
Writing to Describe
  • I read the passage from Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant", and we talked about diction, imagery, and sounds.
Show, Don't Tell
  • Brad, Mallory, Nick, Jena and Taylor were kind enough to act out the scenes on pages 66-7, so we could see the difference between a scene that is simply told, and a scene that is shown.  We did note that showing isn't always the way to go.  Sometimes telling is expedient and necessary.
Writing Assignment:  Perfect Moment
  • This is a piece we've been working up to this week.  Today I talked about several quotes that should set the tone for writing about this moment, and I read two examples for last year's class.  We had twenty minutes to type a first draft, and we handed that draft in.
Read-Aloud
  • I read the Santa's Helper letters aloud, and we all figured out whose was whose.




No comments: