Skip to content

Month: December 2018

Published on

L.A. 8

We are wrapping up Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet. This week, we talked about dreams and irony, and we also did a little bit of acting in the form of tableaux. Students are also practicing finding the main idea in a piece of complex text. I've also started to grade notebook checks on Interactive Notebooks: students must have pages complete and neat in order to earn 100%.

Contemporary Lit.

In Contemporary Lit., we are still making our way through Macbeth, slow and steady. We are finishing up Act 4 with some discussions on prophecies, and we had a little fun making our own spells and comparing Macbeth to Harry Potter. We also talked about socioeconomic class and how it relates to Macbeth. Next week, I plan on finishing reading Macbeth, then wrapping up the unit after the New Year by writing an essay about it.

Writing Lab.

After practicing a few pre-writing strategies, we have started our "Gift of Gratitude" scrapbook with the first writing assignment: a Memory List. Students are writing out 25 memories of the subject of their scrapbook, with ten pictures. Memories need at least 2 full sentences each.

Published on

L.A. 8

We are continuing to read Romeo and Juliet this week, and should be nearly done with Act 1. We've added lots of pages to our Interactive Notebook, including a journal entry and notes on Act 1 Scene 1 (1.1). We will also do a small art project this week - creating masks similar to the ones Romeo and Juliet would have worn on the night we met. During this time, we will discuss various symbols in the play, such as stars, and how we can represent them on our masks. Homework includes Main Idea Paragraph #2. These Main Idea Paragraphs are part of the school wide initiative to help students understand complex texts and increase literacy scores on state testing. With weekly practice, students will become pros at recognizing the main idea of any text. 

Contemporary Literature

We are over halfway through Macbeth. This week, we are finishing up Act 3. We have discussed the roles of ghosts in literature, the role of guilt in our lives, and the motif of deception and truth in the play. As part of the latter motif, we created masks that explored the idea of lies revealing truths about certain characters. We also read about the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare's authorship - did William Shakespeare really write the work attributed to him, or was it Edward De Vere, Earl of Oxford? 

Writing Lab.

It's a new session of Writing Lab.! We're off to a great start this trimester with our new cohort. We've begun by discussing the challenges we face that keep us from writing - anything from distractions and difficulties with spelling to feeling insecure and tackling bad memories. We also talked about various strategies we could use to combat these difficulties. Before we begin our "Gift of Gratitude" scrapbook, the project that will be the focus of the entire class, we are practicing various writing skills, such as Significant Details and Show, Don't Tell.