Archive

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

Participial Themes

Participial Themes

English I went over participial phrases today. Participles and their phrases are some of the trickiest elements of grammar, but we'll master it soon enough. English 8 students combined two of last...

Villanelles and Development

Villanelles and Development

English I students finished up their poetry unit with a look at the rules for creating a villanelle: Afterward, we had a Gimkit session to help prepare for tomorrow. English 8 students finished up...

Villanelle and Development

Villanelle and Development

English I students worked on their last poem before the test, "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop. It's a villanelle, and tomorrow students will spend a little time at the start of the lesson determining...

New Sonnets and Charlie’s Change

New Sonnets and Charlie’s Change

English I students continued with sonnets. We also did some practice with parts of speech. We'll have the parts of speech test on Friday. English 8 students continued with Flowers for Algernon....

First Sonnet and Final Writing

First Sonnet and Final Writing

English I students finished their first sonnet, Shakespeare's "Sonnet 25." English 8 worked on their culminating analytic project for the quarter, writing about how Charlie's writing demonstrates...

Shakespeare and Schaffer

Shakespeare and Schaffer

English I students began a two-poem study of Shakespeare to finish our poetry unit. English 8 students worked on their analytic paragraphs about Charlie in Flowers for Algernon.

Tone Completion and Algernon Continuation

Tone Completion and Algernon Continuation

English 8 students continued with Algernon, working on more annotation strategies and commonly confused words on No Red Ink. We'll be working on these commonly confused words throughout the year, so...

Advanced Paragraphs and Summarizing

Advanced Paragraphs and Summarizing

English I students worked on analyzing two poems ("Those Winter Sundays" and "My Papa's Waltz") in a fairly complicated writing assignment. To be sure, we didn't actually write the paragraphs, but...

Connotation and Objectivity

Connotation and Objectivity

English I students continued working on poetry: today we finished up "Those Winter Sundays" to examine the enormous role connotations play in the poem. English 8 students finished up a brief...

Poetry and Point of View

Poetry and Point of View

English 8 students went through the first entry in the fictional progress reports of Flowers for Algernon. We made some inferences about the narrator, about the additional characters, and about the...