Genesis Reading Blocks 2 and 4: In our first quiz, students demonstrated mastery of their knowledge of documentary novel and satire–kudos!  This week, we took a close look at the document genre through essay test question prompt analysis.  In Nothing But the Truth, Avi uses this genre to communicate crucial information to the reader about character relationships, backstory, and objectives.  Students read this passage critically in order to write their own version of a fictional story’s character relationships in this form.  We also read and annotated a chapter from the personal narrative/memoir Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang in order to investigate the flip side of the writing workshop strategy “show, don’t tell” that was introduced this week.  Students also began vocabulary study with a series of analogies/critical thinking questions.  This activity kicked off our word stem study, which will support students in deconstructing difficult vocabulary from high-lexile texts.  We will wrap up our novel study on Nothing But the Truth next week.

Legacy/Explorers Reading Blocks 2 and 4: Students have done admirably with their reading of the world classic challenge Cry, the Beloved Country.  Our class activities have focused on cooperative learning for handling tough text.  Students began the week with a story structure chart to help them assess their comprehension of character, plot, and major happenings.  They participated in a group jigsaw activity of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom, where they confirmed the Big Idea of the text and communicated linkages to Cry, the Beloved Country.  In a partner activity, they worked on rendering their higher-order thinking about events in the text (synthesizing/creating on Bloom’s thinking taxonomy) through collaboratively developing two products in response to question stations.  Students did great with this new task, and will have additional time to revise/present their products.  We will be discussing the second third of the novel next week.

Legacy/Explorers Writing Blocks 3 and 4: We began our writing workshop on nonfiction this week, and students were introduced to the eight organizational text structures and their accompanying signal words that will help them with comprehension.  They used the “repeated reading” strategy to apply these text structures to brief readings at the interest station they chose, which included authors such as Kant, Freud, Woolf, Burke, Descartes, Emerson,  Plato, and others.  Students began Paragraph Plans to help them locate the nonfiction text they will analyze in their own nonfiction paragraph writing.  Students worked on main idea/developing paragraphs at the end of the week.  We will continue this work next week.  They always have something to write, so encourage them to freewrite with their free time!  All writing is saved in their classroom portfolios.

Genesis Reading Blocks 2 and 4: Complete all of Nothing But the Truth + 3 notecards for Monday, October 6.  Creative writing assignment draft is also due Monday, October 6.  Block 2: You have to complete your reading/annotating of Red Scarf Girl for Monday, October 6.)

Legacy/Explorers Reading: Complete up to p. 209 of Cry, the Beloved Country for Monday, October 6.  Spend some enjoyable time independent reading this weekend!

Legacy/Explorers Writing: Keep generating freewriting/brainstorming for your writing portfolio.

This post was not able to be posted yesterday due to Edublogs and school servers being down.  I apologize for the inconvenience.

Legacy/Explorers Writing Blocks 3 and 4: Bring nonfiction article of interest to class on Friday, October 3.