English 8 students had a Socratic Seminar based on the reading from Frederick Douglass. English I Honors students worked on the characters' varying views of love in Romeo and Juliet. [gallery...
Archive
What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…
Project and Step One Wrap Up
English I Honors took the shortened time after the second day of district-mandated benchmark testing, which puts us on a two-hour delay schedule with half an hour per class, to work through some...
Hidden Stage Directions and Transitioning
English 8 students transitioned from working on pronouns and antecedents to using them as a reading comprehension aid. We started working on the Frederick Douglass text we'll be focussing on this...
Starting the Play and Antecedents
English I Honors students worked on the opening of Romeo and Juliet. The opening pages are pun-filled and not all of the puns (or in fact, none of the puns) are immediately accessible to...
First Text Structures and Finishing Prologue
English I students finished the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. They discovered a number of patterns that helped them piece together the whole text and make sense of it. It's not that hard, is it,...
First Day Back 2020
English I Honors students began Romeo and Juliet -- the greatest challenge of the school year, in many ways. We looked closely at the prologue: We'll be continuing tomorrow. English 8 students had...
Final School Day of the Decade
Today was the last day of school for an entire decade. "Just think, twenty years ago," I told the kids, "it was the last day of school not just for the year, not just for the decade, not just for...
Season’s Joy
This year, we shared some seasonal joy.
Tests
Every class had a test today: English I Honors kids too a test on clauses and verbs while English 8 kiddos had a test on poetry and figurative language.
Test Prep for Everyone
After going over our diagramming homework (look at that beast below), we worked on test review for tomorrow. English 8 students worked on review for their own test tomorrow.
Clause Review via Sentence Type and
English I Honors students began a review for the test on Wednesday by going over sentence types in small groups. Students are working to be able to differentiate between four sentence types: Simple...
Friday Inference Work and Clauses Overview
English I Honors students finished up clauses and did some review work for the test next week. We also added gerund and infinitive phrases to our sentence diagramming repertoire. Students were...
