English 8 students worked toward completing their analytic essays on voice in Nightjohn. We began earlier this week with some group planning and thinking:

The topic sentences we wrote as a class. Students completed the examples for the paragraphs in groups, with each student taking one of the three topics.

Many of the examples (especially for diction) came from work we’d done earlier in the unit:

At this point, students who have been focused and working well are almost done; those who haven’t are going to have to work on it over the long weekend.

English I students finished up their analysis of “Sonnet 29” with an examination of the elements of a sonnet:

We then turned our attention to “Sonnet 18” — undoubtedly Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

We’ll be finishing up sonnets next week as we work through our district-mandated, quarterly benchmark tests, which will take the majority of two days’ instructional time.

Afterward, we’ll have a test on the poetry unit on 26 May.

Homework

• English 8: 
  • work on your Nightjohn paragraphs as necessary;
  • work on your article of the week as needed;
  • work on your No Red Ink as necessary.
• English I Honors: 
  • work on your article of the week as needed;
  • work on your No Red Ink as necessary.