January 13

Last Two Days

I was having a little trouble connecting to the internet yesterday, so this is the post for both yesterday’s class and today’s.

The root words:

Tuesday Able, Ible meaning able to. Example words included curable, ability, capable.
Wednesday Re meaning again or back. Example words included revise, reestablish, reverse.

The DLW sentences were:

Tuesday – The Petrified Forest located in the Painted Dessert of Ariz. is a hole forest of trees turned to stone by ancient volcanic lava. (Hints, Comma for nonrestrictive phrase and clauses, Using the Right Word, Abbreviations)
Wednesday – 1/2 of the people of nev. lives in las vegas and the other half live outside it. (Hints, Abbreviations, Numbers, Hyphen, Subject-Verb Agreement, Capitalization, Comma between Independent Clauses)

Tuesday was a Writing Workshop Day and we looked at all the writing contest opportunities listed on the Writing Workshop page. I offered to help any student before school, after school, at lunch or between classes who might like to enter any of the writing contests. Prizes range from cash, savings bonds, scholarships and other prizes. Our mini lesson for the day’s writing workshop was on word choice and many of the different types of word that we can look at to improve word choice in our writing. I gave the students a packet to put in their English Binders that covered Homonyms, Homophones, Homographs, and Heteronyms. We also reviewed Antonyms and Synonyms. Several resources (Dictionaries, Thesauruses, Other writers’ work, Descriptive Word Poster, etc.) were listed for finding alternative words for our writing. Then we were given most of the class period to write. We were instructed to turn our revised Anchor Piece in by the start of class on Wednesday with the phrase: Word Choice Revision written under the date in our header. The revision must also be stapled to the top of the original Anchor Piece with the yellow highlighted words.

Wednesday we were back to Treasure Island. The book is getting very interesting and there is a lot going on now. We read aloud in class chapters 8 and 9 and most of chapter 10. We practiced stopping at a few points and visualizing the scene that was taking place. We have to have our study guides ready to be graded for points tomorrow and we need to have two to three sentence summaries for each chapter through the end of chapter 10. There are a lot of characters now as well. A list of all the characters that we need to have some description for has been put on the back board in the room. That list includes:

Squire Telawney
Doctor Livesey
Jim Hawkins
Mrs. & Mrs. Hawkins
Billy Bones (captain)
Black Dog
Pew
Israel Hands
Long John Silver (Barbecue)
Mr. Dance
Tom Redruth
Harry
Ben
Tom Morgan
Mr. Arrow
Joyce
Captain Smollett
Hunter
Mr. Blandly
Job Anderson

It is important to keep all of the characters straight so I am continuing to keep my book highlighted and available for any student who might start getting confused on which character is which.

There was also a writing assignment today. Each student has to put themselves in Captain Smollett’s shoes and write a ship’s log from his perspective. How are things looking to Captain Smollett and what might he have included in the ship’s log for the beginning of the voyage? This writing assignment is to be done in the Response section of our WR’s notebook.


Posted January 13, 2010 by mrsscales207 in category Language Arts

About the Author

My life has taken many paths. I grew up in Farmland, Indiana and graduated from Monroe Central High School in 1979. Yes I know that seems like a long time ago to most of you. After I graduated from High School, I went into the U. S. Navy. Not a lot of women enlisted in the Navy back then. Boot camp was still segregated (that means there were only women in my boot camp) and yes, boot camp is as bad as they say it is. I survived though and began seeing a little more of the world than just our lovely corn and soy bean fields of Indiana. I was an advanced avionics technician and worked on F14 Tomcat jets in the Navy. Back then women couldn't go on ships but I was stationed in Bermuda for a little over a year. Bermuda is beautiful and the people are warm and friendly. I married my husband while in the Navy and we eventually moved to Minnesota.

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