Today, we began looking tone by examining one of the most famous poems ever written: Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night." We spent the day working our way through the poem, making...
Archive
What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…
Schaffer Poems
Today we combined two of our favorite things: poetry and Schaffer analysis. Over the next few weeks, we'll be creating Schaffer paragraphs simply by planning them: we won't actually write them, but...
My Papa’s PSAT Waltz
We had the PSAT today, so many students were out during class. No matter -- it's recorded and posted on Google Classroom. We began the day with a short open-note quiz on the two poems we just...
Connotation 2 Completed
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!...
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...
