English I students (fourth and fifth period) worked on the next step in our phrase phase by covering the basic idea of the participle. It was a 10-minute introduction to the form (the -ing or -en...
Archive
What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…
Sonnet 130, Prepositional Phrases, and the Tell-Tale Heart
English I students finished up their work on sonnets today and then had a little practice with prepositional phrases in a Gimkit to finish the week with a bit of fun. [gallery size="medium"...
Final Sonnet and a Halloween Story
English I students worked on their final sonnet, the famous "Sonnet 130." They looked at it in terms of the problem/solution organizational structure of sonnets, paying particular attention to the...
Sonnet 18 and Irony
English I students today continued with the final stages of our poetry unit, looking at Shakespeare's "Sonnet 18" while refreshing an old term (inversion) and adding a new one (syntax). English 8...
Quiz, Test, and Phrases
English I students had their quarter 1 Article of the Week vocabulary quiz today. Most students did very well. Afterward, we went over prepositional phrases and began a new sonnet. English 8...
Sonnet Completion and Test Prep
English 8 students worked on a practice test for tomorrow's test on Nightjohn, effective readers' skills fragments, and voice. Everyone did fairly well on the pre-test, so we will go ahead with the...
Parsing and SWBS
English I students began a few days' work on Shakespeare as we bring our poetry unit to a conclusion. We started today looking at how we could create an incredibly long sentence out of a relatively...
PSAT and Socratic Magic
English 8 students conducted their first real Socratic Seminar today, discussing a couple of events from Nightjohn, the novel we're about to finish. Students were engaged, focused, and professional...
Extended Metaphor and Socratic Seminar
English 8 students had their first practice Socratic Seminar today. We'll be having a real one tomorrow on a more academic topic: today we went over the rules and discussed -- heavy topic here --...
Figurative Language and Major Assessment
English I students worked on figurative language today, focusing on the difference between tenor and vehicle. We did some work identifying them before turning our attention to the poems we'd already...
Tonal Shift and Effective Readers’ Skills
English I Students in English I finished looking at Billy Collins's poem "The Lanyard" and the shift in tone that occurs in the poem. After watching Collins reading the poem,...
Tone and Chapter 3 Skills
English I Students in third and fourth periods worked on tone in poetry, looking at a lovely poem by Billy Collins called "The Lanyard." We didn't quite get to the tonal question as we were working...
