First period continued working on the newspaper articles for The Giver. I tried to impress upon students the concept of spin: since everything in Jonas’s community is completely controlled, the powers that be would not willingly admit that something  had spun out of their control. They would not be forthright when explaining what had been going on.

First period also continued looking at sentence types, specifically complex sentences (one independent clause with one or more subordinate clause.

Second period continued working on Antigone. One might say we continued concluding it, for we’re in the final few lessons.

Second Period Writing

We started the lesson by concluding the group writing prompt from yesterday:

Creon says, “Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, just things and unjust…(132).” Do you agree or disagree that citizens should always obey elected officials? Explain your response.

Students took turns evaluating the initial drafts. Next, we took the work and evaluated it in small groups.

Second Period Writing, One Shyly

We ended the day with another topic:

Creon says, “Disobedience is the worst of evils (132).” Is obedience necessary for good citizenship? Is there ever a time when civil disobedience might be more right than blind obedience.

We’ll be finishing it all up tomorrow and the next day, tying up all the loose ends to determine an overall theme for Antigone.

Second Period Writing

Fourth period completed the work on point of view in conjunction with Flowers for Algernon. We began working on a short concluding project in which we switch from first to third person point of view. We’ll be writing a report, and we brainstormed the following topics:

Fourth Period Topics

Sixth period completed prepositions, doing a bit of work with prepositional phrases, before beginning the final analysis of point of view in Flowers for Algernon.

Homework

• First period: complete the second side of the complex sentences handout.
• Second period:
• quiz coming up (tomorrow);
• continue working on “breaking the law” rewrites;
• read the project overview.