Archive

What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…

Infinitives and Planning

Infinitives and Planning

English I students worked on infinitives today, and in doing so, they're nearing the end of our short unit on phrases. English 8 students used a model personal narrative to reverse-engineer its...

Gerunds and a Chronological Text Structure Example

Gerunds and a Chronological Text Structure Example

English I students finished up participles and moved on to gerunds. They're a little trickier than participles in some ways and yet a little easier to recognize at the same time. English 8 worked on...

Text Structures and Participles

Text Structures and Participles

English 8 continued a brief overview of text structures in conjunction with the "Tell-Tale Heart." English I students went over participial phrases today after going over the annotations they could...

Annotations and Text Structures

Annotations and Text Structures

English 8 students continued working with text structures, applying the chronological text structure to "A Tell-Tale Heart" before moving on to the cause/effect text structure. We'll be applying it...

Final Poetry and Tone and Mood

Final Poetry and Tone and Mood

English I Honors students had their final day of test prep/unit review today. I gave students a copy of the poems that will be on the test tomorrow, and they had the opportunity to collaborate on...

Poetry Review, Participles, and Socratic Seminar

Poetry Review, Participles, and Socratic Seminar

English I students (fourth and fifth period) worked on the next step in our phrase phase by covering the basic idea of the participle. It was a 10-minute introduction to the form (the -ing or -en...

Final Sonnet and a Halloween Story

Final Sonnet and a Halloween Story

English I students worked on their final sonnet, the famous "Sonnet 130." They looked at it in terms of the problem/solution organizational structure of sonnets, paying particular attention to the...

Sonnet 18 and Irony

Sonnet 18 and Irony

English I students today continued with the final stages of our poetry unit, looking at Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" while refreshing an old term (inversion) and adding a new one (syntax). English 8...

Quiz, Test, and Phrases

Quiz, Test, and Phrases

English I students had their quarter 1 Article of the Week vocabulary quiz today. Most students did very well. Afterward, we went over prepositional phrases and began a new sonnet. English 8...

Sonnet Completion and Test Prep

Sonnet Completion and Test Prep

English 8 students worked on a practice test for tomorrow's test on Nightjohn, effective readers' skills fragments, and voice. Everyone did fairly well on the pre-test, so we will go ahead with the...

Parsing and SWBS

Parsing and SWBS

English I students began a few days' work on Shakespeare as we bring our poetry unit to a conclusion. We started today looking at how we could create an incredibly long sentence out of a relatively...