Homework & learning updates
Homework
Monday - Students should finish the final drafts of their expository essays if they have not already done so. Ample time was provided in class, so anyone still working on it should be close to finished. Please take this opportunity to read your child's writing! They have been working on this particular essay since last Wednesday. All students must demonstrate their outlining skills by completing an outline for the essay they will be writing in Ms. Kennel's class this week. To be clear, the outline is a graded homework assignment for my class, but it will be a great help to students as they work on their social studies essay. Students do have a test tomorrow in ELA. It consists of reading and responding to passages, but they will be expected to remember and apply their knowledge of diction. Tuesday - Students should complete the coordinating adjectives handout. This is review. Wednesday - Students should finish answering the Socratic Seminar questions that we began together in class. Tomorrow, all students will be participating in their second Socratic Seminar. Thursday - Students will create an outline for the expository essay that they will be completing over the break (see below). The prompt is as follows:Over the course of the novel Max finds his voice both literally and figuratively. What do you think that this means? Friday - Over the break, students should finish their Freak the Mighty poster projects. Rubrics and directions were sent home on Friday, November 14th. Students were asked to get a standard sized piece of poster board (any color) and create a plot diagram for Freak the Mighty. All students were taken to see examples of this assignment that another class created using The Lightning Thief.
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The major focus this week (and for the end of last week as well) is writing an expository essay. Expository essays are informational essays. Students have so far learned how to write an introductory paragraph (hook, bridge, and thesis), body paragraphs (in AEC format), and a conclusion paragraph (restate the thesis using different words and clincher statement). They have begun to use outlines to plan out their essays, and they will be expected to demonstrate this skill in Tuesday night's homework. This week, they will be working on the embedded assessment in Springboard (writing an expository essay), and they will be free to ask any questions as they work in order to do their very best. On Friday, they will have a test on which they will need to write an expository paragraph.
Homework Monday - Read chapter 19 of Freak the Mighty and write one quote that is particularly interesting. Write one example of a critical thought that you had about that quote. (Critical thinking is when you think about the author's writing. Is it descriptive, is the diction appropriate, etc.) Tuesday - Diction practice handout. Wednesday & Thursday - TBA, stay tuned to the text messages and your student's agenda! We are preparing for another Socratic Seminar at the end of this week! Ask your student about the first Socratic Seminar that they participated in to get a feel for what they are, and check out this great piece about Socratic Seminars that aired on NPR last week: 50 Great Teachers: Socrates, The Ancient World's Teaching Superstar. EDIT - 11/04 - Our Socratic Seminar is being pushed back. We will conduct it upon the completion of the novel. I am doing this in order to ensure that students have enough time to adequately prepare for next week's assessments. They will be expected to write an expository essay on both assessments. We will be using Thursday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday to prepare for that. Thus, Thursday night's homework will have to change. We continue to read Freak the Mighty. If you would like to engage in a meaningful discussion about the book with your child, you might ask your student what themes (lessons taught or big ideas) they are noticing as they read. Some powerful themes include, but are not limited to:
Monday - Same assignment as Friday. Double entry journal entry for chapter 12 of Freak the Mighty. If you're confused about this, I gave a great example in my homework post for last week, so you can go back and look at that. If you have a printer and would like to use the official form instead of loose-leaf, here's the file:
Tuesday - No school for students!
Wednesday - 1st Block - Students should complete their "I am From" poems. An example can be found here. 2nd Block - Students should read chapter 14 of Freak the Mighty, write one quote, and an example of their own critical thinking about that quote. (See last week's post for help with what critical thinking looks like). Thursday - Annotate the article. Students should write a one - two sentence summary for each paragraph in the article. None of it should be copied straight from the article, as that is plagiarism. Finally, if you notice that your child is struggling with a particular aspect of writing, The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) is an excellent resource. From how to use a comma to common misspellings, it has useful information on everything. Check it out! |
Resources
If you would like to earn books for our class, sign up for homework alert texts or emails, and access the same reading and writing resources that we use in our classroom with explanations, check out my Class Resources! Archives
April 2016
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