Today was our first day using TweenTribune as a class. Everyone who had followed the directions and successfully registered with TweenTribune used their Quick Write time to select a news story to read and comment on. The comments had to be well written responses, so that meant no text abbreviations, good grammar, and a complete well developed thought.

Those students who had not gotten registered on TweenTribune had to read the paper copy of one of the news articles that Mrs. Scales had selected. As a consequence of not following the clear directions she had give us on Monday and repeated in the blog earlier this week, Mrs. Scales made sure the article she picked wasn’t the most interesting article. Everyone had time later in class to go through the registration process again. Tomorrow we will do another TweenTribune Quick Write assignment, so everyone must be registered in order to pick their own article and do their responses on line.

Mrs. Scales shared three bits of good news with the class today. First of all she attended the track meet last night and was very impressed with our runners. She said she wished she had taken her camera. That led her right into her second bit of good news. We received another Bell Grant. The grant will pay for 12 flash drives for the classroom, writable DVDs and materials to design and make covers for our whole 7th grade Language Arts class to do a really cool digital yearbook / portfolio. Every student will get to have a DVD to keep and remember all the cool things we did over the last year. The last but certainly not least appreciated bit of good news was that everyone had done such a good job on the Sentence Type homework assignment that we don’t have to do any more worksheets or homework on it. Mrs. Scales said that she was either a really good teacher, we were all extremely smart kids, or at least one of us was extremely smart and everyone else just copied. She was just kidding; she knows that we would never copy our homework.

We did review one of the sentences on the homework sheet that several people missed. It was number 4 on the Complex & Compound-Complex Sentence side of the homework.

Because mangroves have complex root systems, the trees only thrive in very watery conditions, such as wetlands, and slow-moving rivers.

We reviewed the foldable we made for the definition of each type of sentences. While a complex sentence has one independent clause and one dependent clause, there must be at least two independent clauses in a sentence to make it a compound-complex sentence. The only independent clause in the above example sentence is the trees only thrive in very watery conditions. There are two other clauses in the sentence, but they are both dependent clauses.

After finishing the sentence modeling and review, Mrs. Scales reminded everyone that the purpose of the root word presentations is to help everyone remember the root words and meanings for the big second semester root word test. That test will be given next Thursday.