Fourth and Fifth Periods

English I students began their reading instruction in earnest today by learning a few techniques to help them get through tough sentences a little more fluidly. We learned the initial ideas behind bracketing/chunking sentences to make long, challenging sentences more manageable.

We learned three tricks:

1. Use punctuation to break sentences into manageable pieces. Semicolons, commas, and dashes are useful indicators for this.
2. Make sure you know the subject, verb, and object of a given sentence, and be aware that the author might be employing inversion. This means that instead of SVO (subject/verb/object), it might be an inverted sentence that is OSV (object/subject/verb).
3. When you have a bunch of sub-chunks in a sentence, try to determine which is the main chunk. This is a convoluted way of saying, “Make sure you know which clauses are independent and which are subordinate, but we haven’t talked about phrases yet let alone clauses, so this vocabulary is foreign to some students…at this point…

We then practiced these techniques on the opening lines of “The Cask of Amontillado.”

Sixth Period

English 8 students in sixth period began by working with the new article of the week, working together to find context clues for “data visualization.”

We will be spending a bit more time the rest of this week working on AOW work to make sure everyone feels a bit more confident about what to do.

We also worked on evaluating some of their peers’ Schaffer paragraphs. They were all good examples of Schaffer paragraphs, but they had one element that could be improved. We saw a paragraph that was using transition words in the CM:

Mrs.Jones helped Roger because she went through the same things and felt empathy for his pain. For example, after Mrs.Jones has brought Roger inside and begins preparing food she admits “I have done things too”. This proves how Mrs.Jones has gone through the same things as Roger as she is giving him a second chance to prove himself. Also while they are eating Mrs.Jones didn’t ask about Roger’s life which shows self respect because she would never know why he did what he did so instead she told Roger about her job and life. In addition, after she had him wash his face and had a very true and kind conversation with him “ she heated some lima beans and ham she had in the icebox”. This is important because it shows how Mrs.Jones feels empathy for his pain so she gives Roger food. Furthermore this bond that Mrs.Jones and Roger have is strong and causes Mrs.Jones to feel a certain type of way and her way was to give Roger food and bath himself because maybe she never got that. As a result this shows how Mrs.Jones has gone through the same things as Roger and how she feels empathy for his pain by helping him and giving him a second chance.

We also looked at a paragraph that had two somewhat-unrelated CMs:

Mrs. Jones helped roger because she had been through the same things   and felt empathy for his disadvantages For example, after Mrs.  Jones has brought Roger inside and begins preparing food she confessed  “ I have done things to which I will not tell you“ This proves that she has made her own mistakes and has been through the same things. When she told him about her past, she became more trustworthy, and showed they aren’t as different as he thought. In addition, despite  mrs. Jones being  assaulted she  still brought Roger in and “she  heated some lima beans and ham she had in the icebox. This proves she is empathetic  , because she just got robbed by him and shes still using what little food she has to feed him The definition of empathy is the ability to share and understand one’s feelings, and Mrs. Jones understood his emotions These are all examples of Mrs. Jones helping  Roger because she had been through the same things   and felt empathy for his disadvantages

We usually don’t assess grammatical issues when evaluating paragraphs, and we didn’t get to the third paragraph.

Seventh Period

After working on the article of the week (see above), we had independent reading time and late-work completion time for students who had not yet completed their first Schaffer paragraph.