I hope by next week to be on my regular weekly blogging schedule again. I'm sure your students told you that I went out of town on Friday for my fiftieth birthday, and I forced myself to abandon all schoolwork while gone. I've also been extremely busy grading all the late work that should have been turned in a long time ago. You've probably noticed grades getting filled in slowly in PowerSchool. Some of that resulted from student illnesses or going out of town before Christmas or extra activities, like Strolling Strings, so I've put them to work tying up all those lose ends. We were finishing a group of exercises in which they had to write about why and how authors use figurative language, and it was very difficult for them. I could see some lightbulbs coming on, and we'll be doing some upcoming activities where they put what they learned into use, so I hope to see the bulbs go from 25 watt to 100 watt. (That was a metaphor!)
I would have finished more grading, but we are now required to write detailed lesson plans for everything done in the classroom. When our administrators visit our classrooms, as they frequently do, we are required to have our plans out for everything that we teach. In one class period, I may start or cover three different lessons. Writing a plan from scratch can take hours. For example, I want the students to read two poems this week. My lesson plan for it is five single-spaced pages and took two hours to write. Thank you for being understanding about my not having all of the grading complete at this point.
They grumbled in pain about returning to work on the first day back, then we had a snow day, so the next day I asked them act out Katy Perry's "Firework" as literal language before writing about why authors use figurative language. They saw how difficult it is to write without figurative language because it permeates our writing and speaking. They took notes on sentence fragments and how to correct them, and we practiced. They are doing better than they think on fragments, so this week we'll add run-ons (fused sentences and comma splices) to skills for writing.
We began reading Night by Elie Wiesel. I've already asked them to do several anticipatory writings about memoir and memory, because we are looking at the book as a primary source and how to validate primary sources rather than just as a class book that we are reading. I showed a few minutes of Wiesel's tour of Auschwitz with Oprah, and they were overwhelmed that something like this happened in our century. Core 2 is reading it independently, and it needs to be finished by January 28, the day we return from the semester break.
Students will have a vocabulary quiz on Wednesday, January 21, on qualm, cohesive, explicit, clarity, and stellar. They asked to have a major grade before the end of the quarter that they felt confident they could do well on, so I announced it before we left for winter break so they could study each day. They need to fill in the blank in a sentence, identify a picture that fits the word, and (the most points) write a sentence with strong context clues using the word correctly, and they are allowed to memorize the sentence they wrote in class on the exercise because it's been checked for correctness.
Encore is almost finished with That Was Then, This Is Now and ECO has been a very efficient study hall with a time for students to get extra help from teachers or each other to complete assignments.
Please contact me with any questions or concerns. It's crazy enough when the quarter ends, but our semester is ending, and it's the time of the year for weather issues. It's easy to get confused. Except for far too much talking in class, which interferes with learning, I'm very proud of what the students are accomplishing.
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