English 8 students went over the anticipation guide for their new unit which will cover determining the main idea, summarizing, determining the theme, and examining point of view. We will be using Flowers for Algernon as our anchor text.

English I students worked on creating a strong topic sentence for “The Cask of Amontillado” analysis. We went through several discussions in pairs, groups of three, and groups of four using a strategy from the Ellevation (no, that’s not a misspelling; it’s clever marketing) website, the name of which escapes me but what I’ve always called reciprocal discussions. We honed in on a TS that focuses on questions two and three from yesterday’s discussion questions:

1. What can we infer about Montressor and Fortunato and their role/position in society?
2. Who is he talking to? He keeps saying “you” – whom is he addressing?
3. We have two periods of time in this story: 1) when Montressor did these actions 2) when Montressor is telling this story. How much time is in between these?
4. Where does this story take place? What country?

We’ll be planning the rest of our paragraph tomorrow.

Homework

• English 8: complete No Red Ink as necessary.
• English I Honors: rework your TS to include information from questions two and three (see above).