Parents, Thank you for those who attended back to school night. It is a great way to casually meet parents and begin school-to-home communication. Because the evening is a bit chaotic and we do not always have time to finish our thoughts, I did send out a follow-up email with details about my class and this website. If you did not get that email, please contact me and I will forward it to you. At times, my email could end up in your spam/junk mail or I have made a typo, and it never sent. Again, please contact me if you would like this emailed information.
As for an update in our class, students have had their first real learning curve in high school with the Language Log project. Students now realize that the work assigned in high school might take longer to complete then it did in middle school-- not to mention that a deadline is a deadline for a reason. All in all, the projects were a successful attempt at MLA (a process for citing sources to ensure the work is not plagiarized) and having to apply knowledge about definitions rather than copy and pasting definitions. Students are continuing their MLA citation work in social studies with Mr. O'Leary.
At this point in the quarter we are halfway through our short fiction unit. We have read "Poison," "The Lottery," and "Harrison Bergeron". Our focus has been identifying story elements and then taking that one step further to make connections. We have been asking such questions as: Why does the author____? How could this support the character's actions? So how does all of this contribute to theme? All of these question and more are to help us write about literature: forming a thesis statement, understanding how we have to have original analysis in our writing, how to use concrete details from the story as examples in our writing, and how to make our ideas connect and convince the reader.
Writing about literature is a tall order and something we will work on all year long. The students have been given a very concrete structure for this type of essay writing. All of these documents are also on the website in the format of power point notes and handouts. By the end of the quarter, they will have written their first formal essay for our class and have submitted it to turnitin.com, a plagiarism prevention data base.
