March 9

Day 4 of Twain WebQuest

Everyone was given time to review the blog and lesson plans from yesterday. QW time was used to complete any Literary Circle chunk 2 forum responses that had not already been completed. Then we did the root word for today, which was dynam, meaning power. Our example words were dynamite, dynamic and dynameter ( an instrument used to measure the power of a telescope).

We reviewed several elements of humor and took the following notes in our W-R’s notebooks:

Elements of Humor

Literary devises used to produce humor include:

Hyperbole – an extreme exaggeration such as “I’m so hungry, I could eat the whole cow!”

Irony – using words to express something completely different than the words literal meaning. An example would be – The old man was so lucky that he won the lottery the day before he died.

Satire critical humor that makes fun of someone – mocking.

All three of these literary devices can be used in a Parody – created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original by means of humorous imitation. An example would be Scary Movie or the Saturday Night Live skits about the daily news.

Five additional terms as they relate to humor are:

Wit – sudden sharpness or quick perception.

Bull – based on outrageous contradictions, totally untrue – as in someone is feeding me a line of bull.

Blue Humor – humor based on easily offensive subject matter such as bodily functions.

Banter – good natured teasing back and forth.

Wise Crack – cleaver remarks.

Before we returned to group work on the webquest, we also made a progress graph in our W-R’s notebooks for the 4th grading period writing assignments. The graph is just like the one we did for the 2nd grading period. It has three columns and five rows. Just as before the rows are labeled in progressive order: Prewriting, Draft, Revision, Edit, and Publish. The three columns are labeled Expository, Persuasive, and Narrative.