Students today completed Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" with the annotations below: Students who did not view the streamed class need to view the recording now on Google Classroom. ("But Mr. Scott!...
Archive
What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…
Connotation
Today we began working on connotations by looking at Robert Hayden’s excellent poem “Those Winter Sundays.” After defining connotations through a modified form of inductive reasoning, we looked at...
End of Poetry Beginnings
We finished going over today the poem "Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry." An annotated copy is below. We also completed the list of actions for understanding a poem: Read...
Poetry Beginnings
We began a new unit today in which we'll be studying poetry, working specifically to develop skills necessary to parse and to understand a poem. We went over the first of several steps on how to...
AOW and TS
Students went over the first AOWs (article of the week) today, looking at all the context clues that were in place for "straw men." Afterward, we did some workshopping on our "Gift of the...
First Socratic Seminar
We had our first Socratic seminar this week. It’s so much different in such small classes. In one period, there were only eight students, which means four pairs. Four people talking doesn’t allow...
Method 3: Looking at Irony and Symbolism
Monday and Tuesday the kids looked at the third way of analyzing short stories: we examined the symbolism and irony in a story, noting that they are often connected. Below is a video of the class.
Narrator and Point of View
Students in this week's first in-school lesson looked at perspective and point of view. We began with a strange activity in which students studied one particular portion of the room and then made a...
First Analytic Schaffer Paragraph
Students who were in the classroom today had a chance to collaborate with each other to plan their first Schaffer paragraph. Students who were at home probably struggled a bit with the work because...
Introduction to Quote Integration
We began looking at how to integrate quotes into concrete details. It's not just a question of taking the quote from the source, throwing a "For example" at the beginning of the sentence, and...
Planning Analysis for “The Sniper”
Students have been spending the last two days working on how we can use plot and setting to analyze a short story. Each day's classes came up with slightly different results. Our first step was to...
Analyzing and Paraphrasing
Today we began the heavy lifting of the first unit of significance: we're learning the difference between analyzing and summarizing in order to begin analyzing short stories. We looked at Li-young ...
