November 3-7, 2014

On Monday, teachers met across the county to look at our SOLS in detail. We then returned to our school, and our English department met all afternoon, discussing an alignment plan for writing across the three grade levels. I always enjoy talking about teaching writing.

On Tuesday, I had an opportunity to see many of you and share what your student is doing in class.

Back to a new quarter on Wednesday. So far, the technology seems to be cooperating better than last quarter, and students are rapidly finishing the MLA and video projects. I am completing grade change forms as they do, so those report cards with "assignment missing" will be issued the correct grade for the quarter.

Those who weren't working on those assignments in Core 1 and 3 worked on The Outsiders performance assessment of writing a sequel. The target due date for that is November 14, but we will see what we get accomplished in the upcoming week. They are also working on essay, but I wanted to do a few revision lessons before I asked them to turn those in. This week, I reviewed nouns and adjectives and how adding adjectives to their writing can make their writing more descriptive. We also returned to vocabulary study, and we should have a quiz sometime next week. We even managed to squeeze in some silent reading time this week. Next week, daily reading time starts for the whole school.

C2 has been continuing Hamlet. The other cores began it last week, but we haven't gotten far. The picture below is third core's "Polonius family" as we discussed the characters and opening action of the play. A student snapped some pictures at my request, but he's only sent me this one. Sorry if your student doesn't appear!

ECO only met once this week, and we continued our discussion about how to ace interview questions.

Encore is still reading Babe and Me, and they took an SOL reading check that showed many students are (not surprisingly) still having trouble remembering the difference between foreshadowing and flashback.