English I students began working on their short story unit, looking today at how a story’s setting might be tied to its conflict. We read “The Sniper” and made a few observations about how the setting of the Irish Civil War is critical to the surprise ending. At the end of all that, students were surprised to discover we’d created a very rough topic sentence for our first Schaffer paragraph.

English 8 students continued with “Thank You, Ma’am,” adding predicting to our annotation/effective readers’ skills tool box.

After we reviewed how predicting works as a class, students moved into pairs to make some predictions of their own.

Afterward, we reviewed the predictions and made sure that a couple of predictions were common among all students.

On a side note, the cooling in my room seems to be almost fixed: we came into the classroom today to find the whole unit disassembled as our great GCS HVAC guys worked to find the problem and fix it.

A special thank you to them for their dedication in working to make the learning environment comfortable for my students.

Homework

• English 8 Studies: none.
• English I Honors: use the information we discovered in class to write a rough topic sentence for our analytic paragraph about “The Sniper.”