September 8-12, 2004

When you're feeling sad, learn something.~~T. H. White in The Once and Future King

This is the week that all classes were required to give pretests. English is unlike any other class, because we have to give two pretests: one for writing and one for reading. I also had to give the STAR, which is very short and tells me the student's independent reading level, and a 31-word spelling inventory, which also doesn't take very long and tells me how to help a student with spelling. The students and I were all very sad, however, to stop the excitement of learning to collect required data. The next big data collection event is on October 9, when we will spend a large portion of the day prescreening with Aimsweb. For that assessment, students read a one-minute passage and read a three-minute passage and circle the correct word. Most of these assessments were on the computers, so we had to stop the research we began last week, because there were no available computers.

Cores 1 and 3 We briefly read Thomas Hardy's poem "The Convergence of the Twain" about the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, because a British poet, Simon Armitage, wrote a poem three months after 9/11 that was inspired by Hardy's poem, "The Convergence of the Twain." (The title means "the coming together of the two," by the way.) Our main focus was alliteration and other sound patterning and seeing how one work of art can inspire another, as well as discussing the main idea. (Summary: while the Titanic was being built, the iceberg was forming, and one day they met, and the world was shaken. While the Twin Towers were being built, the force of hatred that would drive the planes was forming, and one day they met, and the world was changed.)

We read the poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" by Robert Frost and discussed sound patterning, meaning, and author's purpose for writing a poem that reminds you that all good things disappear. Before they read the poem, I asked them to do a freewrite about things that had changed in their lives and how they dealt with change, and I got to read some fascinating pieces of writing.

We began reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and learned the word "vacillate" in a Wordplay. A Wordplay is a vocabulary exercise I create, which is based on the massive amounts of reading I've done on how students best learn new vocabulary. I find two brief real passages, usually from the news, that use the target word. Next, I give the definition choices, and then I give four sentences, one or two of which use the word incorrectly. After identifying the incorrect ones, we discuss what made the usage incorrect. We next identify the parts of speech for all uses of the word, then they have to write a sentence with strong context clues, which I check, and then they draw a picture to illustrate the word, which visually reinforces the meaning. Whenever I test vocabulary, we cover five words and they are tested three ways: fill in the blank, write a sentence using strong context clues, and match the correct word to the illustration. We also learn words in our readings. I stop and explain the word, use it in a variety of sentences, then ask students for meaning. This year, I've been putting these new vocab words up on the walls of the room as they learn them, so every now and then I stop and ask them what they mean.

The students also added the app WeVideo on their Google accounts and had a brief time to play around with it at the end of last week. They will be using the app to create projects this year. It's similar to Windows Moviemaker and Adobe Premiere.

Core 2 English Unfortunately, they didn't have time to explore the "Convergence of the Twain" poems, although they completed all of the other activities listed above for the other English classes. They are reading The Outsiders independently outside of class, and they are turning in reflective responses, which get better and better every time. Since they were into the novel already, we reviewed conflict in literature, and they then began a creative writing exercise in which they used three pictures of people I found on Flickr to create three characters in conflict at a dinner table. They had to write a brief skit with their dialogue. We have not finished this yet, and the students are impatient to return to it. They were giggling like mad things while they were writing. We also found some time to have an oral discussion of the book up to chapter six.

Encore We are reading Honus and Me aloud and using a graphic organizer to make predictions about events in the book. They seem to really be enjoying this story about a boy who finds a valuable Honus Wagner baseball card in an attic, and we are moving quickly through the book. I've never had a class before that fights about who gets to read next!

ECO Mrs. Zimmon explained how to get an employment certificate (the new name for the worker's permit) to get a job and where to find jobs locally. We also watched brief videos about the careers of small engine repair and auto body mechanic.