Kingston's English Classes

I introduced this week’s writing assignment.  The students are to write a three paragraph essay about which season of the year is their favorite.  The shaping sheets will be due on Friday for them to peer edit.  They will type the essays into Google Docs next Monday and the typed draft will be due Tuesday, March 27th.

We also reviewed for the test on “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket” which will be tomorrow (Thursday, March 22).  Students were given a review guide yesterday and we filled in the plot graph in class yesterday.

We are finishing “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket” this week.  The students have done a great job with visualizing as we read, and they seem to be enjoying the story.  They are eager to see the outcome!  I plan to start another three paragraph essay with them at the beginning of next week.  We have been regularly reviewing the essay parts and I am hoping that the next one will seem more familiar to them.  There will probably be an exam on the short story at the beginning of next week, depending on when we actually wrap up discussion of the story.  They do have a new vocabulary, but we have not spent much time discussing it.  With our shortened periods, we don’t get as much done.  I think their test will be postponed until Monday.

We will continue reading “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket” with a focus on comprehension.  Hopefully, we will come close to finishing the story this week.  We will review the rules for the semicolon and will have an exam on both the semicolon and the colon on Monday 3-12-12.  This test will also include several tricky words we have been practicing (except/accept and whose/who’s).

This week, we are starting a short unit on use of the colon and semicolon.  Today, I will introduce the topic and the students will have time to practice their use.  We will begin reading a new story entitled “Contents of a Dead Man’s Pocket.”  The students have done a prereading exercise on the story and are excited to see if their predictions are correct.  Similar to our reading of “A Visit to Grandmother,” I have created “talk to the text” questions that will focus the students on particular story elements and support their comprehension.  I am attempting to squeeze a vocabulary list into this shortened week, and the students will have a quiz on Thursday regarding the words.  Similar to the last few lists, the quiz will focus on the word meaning rather than spelling skills. 

      We did an editing exercise with their previous writing assignment, after we spent some additional class time clarifying how a three paragraph essay is different from a one paragraph essay.  I think they are beginning to see how things fit together.  We will do additional writing once we finish this story, possibly with a focus on persuasive writing.

We have been reviewing the short story entitled “Through the Tunnel” for the past several days in preparation for a test on it tomorrow.  Today, we finished completing a plot graph.  I told them to be familiar with the definitions of the various elements of plot (exposition, inciting incident, etc.) and to know how our story fits into those areas.  Also, they should be able to identify character traits of Jerry and his mother and explain a part of the story that shows that particular trait.  Tomorrow, we will also review their first three paragraph essay.  They seemed confused by this format, so I am going to go over the parts once more and clarify what each paragraph should contain and how to correctly use transition words between paragraphs.

We typed our essays into the computer today.  The students were a little confused about typing a three paragraph essay, since all of our previous ones have been one paragraph in length.  I told them to finish typing the essay into Google Docs over the weekend and to get some outside advice regarding editing changes.  We will work on editing on Monday and they will submit their final drafts for scoring.

We have been working on the development of a three paragraph essay.  Today, we developed the body.  Tomorrow will be the conclusion.  On Friday, we will type the essays into a Google document.

We are finishing our story on A Visit to Grandmother.  The test for the story will be either Wednesday or Thursday, depending on what discussion we are able to accomplish tomorrow.  The vocab. test will be Friday.

No homework tonight.

We are finishing our story entitled “A Visit to Grandmother” this week.   Also, today the students took the MAP test.  Results will be added to their IEP’s for next year.

Wow!  Where did December go?  We finished “There Will Come Soft Rains” last week and the students did well on their exam regarding the story.  This week, we did a third formal writing piece.  I think the students did very well with using the English Department format without difficulty/help and they were able to create a Google document independently.  That’s great!  The writing is coming along nicely, and they developed single descriptive paragraphs with less help than during other writing assignments.  After the break, we will be moving on to a short story entitled “A Visit to Grandmother’s.”  It uses dialect, and we will be discussing what that is and why it is used.  We will also be reviewing for the midterm exam which will be Tuesday, January 10th.