English 8 students began reading the actual diary today in our new unit on The Diary of Anne Frank. We began by reading some of the actual diary (titled The Diary of a Young Girl) before we move on to the play (titled The Diary of Anne Frank).

We began with a brief review of the effective readers’ skills to remind students what sorts of thoughts should be jostling about their heads as they read. We added two new skills that will prove invaluable in The Diary of Anne Frank:

• picturing the text, and
• questioning the text.

Today we focused on existing skills:

English I students continued working on clauses, focusing on subordinate (also known as dependent) clauses today. We saw that there are two types of subordinate clauses depending on what type of word introduces the clause:

• subordinating conjunctions introduce adverb clauses;
• relative pronouns introduce adjective clauses.

We spent some time examining how this might work:

Afterward, we worked through some group practice examples:

In the process, students realized that adverb clauses often appear at the beginning or end of sentences whereas adjective clauses often appear within an independent clause.

Homework

• English 8 Studies: none.
• English I Honors: 
  • work on No Red Ink as needed;
  • complete the Romeo and Juliet project for turn-in tomorrow.