English I students did a little more work on the Odyssey. We looked at how Homer's non-linear storyline comes about (hint: it involves punctuation) to provide a model for one of the project...
Archive
What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…
Infinitives, a Project, and Quote Embedding
English I students went over infinitives today; in doing so, we've completed all five phrases: prepositional participial gerund infinitive appositive We'll be having a test on them next week. We've...
Allusions and a Test
English 8 students had their test on parts of speech. Afterward, students worked on their "Inside Out" memoir and the accompanying Somebody Wanted But So engagement. Students who did not finish it...
SWBS and Allusions
English 8 read the second selection from The Circuit. It's called "Inside Out" and deals with the author's first days in school and the challenges he face not being fluent in English. We used a...
Completing Paragraphs and More
English 8 worked on two things: first, we took the graphic organizer we made yesterday: We first needed to add the commentary for our paragraph. We wrote it as a class, but in our graphic...
Homeric Embed Completion
English 8 finished their first round of practice with embedding quotes. We shared and assessed our homework. We determined we should include the following for their context: They had already made it...
Embedded Similes
English 8 students continued working on the quote embedding practice we began yesterday. In addition to our trip to the library, we moved students away from teach-centered and group-based work on...
Embedding Quotes and Gerunds
English 8 students worked on embedding quotes in our CDs. We have be using a very simple format: "For example, the text says 'here is the quote.'" This is acceptable but not optimal. Today we worked...
Socratic Reading
English 8 students began working on the first of three selections from The Circuit, Francisco Jiménez's memoir of life as a migrant child. We read "Under the Wire," the first chapter of the book,...
Parts of Speech Review and Views of Calypso
English 8 students worked on a parts of speech review covering nouns, verbs, and adjectives. This is the last of our review: we'll have a test on those three parts of speech late next week. English...
Socratic Odyssey
English 8 students went off-script a little today: we were supposed to start our next reading, "Under the Wire," but as I read through students' responses to the video we watched yesterday ("Harvest...
Opening Unit and Opening Lines
English 8 students began our new unit, which is about the search for home. We'll be starting with some selections about immigration, so we prepared for those selections by watching 10 minutes from...