Thursday, January 13, 2011

Thursday - January 13, 2011

General Announcements:  Spelling and Vocab test tomorrow.  20 points each.  Bring a book to read for afterward.

1st Period - Creative Writing
Due to technical problems, the students had the day in the library to finish writing up their projects.  They should be ready to go and turned in tomorrow. 
Journal entries for this week are also due tomorrow.  1 day to live over again. 

2nd Period - Honors English IV
We finished up the Essay "Bartleby the Scrivener."  Is humanity uncaring to those less fortunate?  Is the boss a good Christian man, or a spineless coward for his handling of Bartleby?  You have been assigned a persuasive essay - 5 paragraphs minimum - about whether the boss is a good man or a spineless fool.  Typed.  Due Wednesday. 

3rd Period - 8th grade English
We learned how to do note cards for research papers today.  You will make TWO sets of note cards.
One set of note cards, called your SOURCE CARDS, should contain all the information you can gather about your sources. 
-Who is the author? 
-What is the title of the book/magazine/website, etc. 
-What date was it published? 
-Where was it published? (printed sources like books, newspapers and magazines only.  This is not   usually known with a website.) 
-What is the name of the publishing company? (Printed materials only again, just like with the "Where" from above.)
-If it is a website, make sure you get the URL.  I usually copy and paste these into a word document rather than try and write down the entire thing, which is often a very long and random series of letters, numbers and signs.
-Use ONE card per source.  Write on the front of the card only. 
-Make sure to number these cards for quick reference later, and to help with the content cards. 

The second set of note cards, called your CONTENT CARDS, should contain any information you find that you want to use in your paper. 
-Qoutes, thoughts, ideas, facts, charts, etc can be included.
-Write ONE thought or quote PER CARD.  Write on the front of the card only for ease of viewing later on when you go to organize your paper. 
-Make sure to include "quotation" marks if something is a direct quote.
-Number these cards according to the source you got them from.  So, if you found your first quote from your first source, you would label the card 1.1. 
-When you find your second thought or quote from the same first source, you should label it 1.2.  The third thought will be 1.3, etc. 
-When you begin selecting information from your second source, label that card 2.1.  The second thought from the second source will be 2.2, etc. 
-Again, write only ONE thought PER CARD - even if it wastes a lot of space.  This will GREATLY aide you in your organization of the paper later on. 

Student names were drawn from a bag to see who had which topic.  Every student was assigned a topic and was told whether they were Pro or Con for their topic.  So, every topic has two students working on it - One for the idea, and one against it. 
Mrs. Henley has the list of which students were assigned to which topics and whether they are Pro or Con. 

4th Period - 7th grade English
We started reading about the "Structure and Purpose of Informational Texts" from page 206 and 208 in the literature books.  We talked about how things written for newspapers are different from things written for enjoyment reading.  Newspapers have the most important things at the beginning.  Books and other things we read for enjoyment can afford to take much longer in getting around to the point.  These lessons will culminate in students taking information from newspapers and doing little summaries and reports on what they find.  Sometimes, these are called current events in history classes. 

5th Period - 12th grade English
We started reading some poems about youth and love.  The first is on page 284 of your literature books titled "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time." by Robert Herrick.  The second one is on page 285 - "To his Coy Mistress." We'll finish that one on Tuesday. 

6th Period - 10th grade Engish
We are reading from Shakespeare on page 966 - Universal themes across Genres and times.  We study literature (hopefully) because it is still applicable to our lives - even if it was written by people hundreds of years ago.  "The Seven Ages of Man" proves that although we have fancier houses, and new toys like computers, phones, etc., as humans we really haven't changed that much. 

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