Parts of the blog written today by Josie C.  Way to go Josie!

Who was Edgar Allan Poe?  That was our quick write on the front board today.  I knew I had heard the name before, but for the life of me I just couldn’t remember why.  Since it is English class, I took a stab in the dark and guessed that he was a poet or an author.  Turns out, I was right on both counts.  He was an author and a poet.  He wrote some very weird stuff.  Today, we were introduced to his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  Now that was quite a story.

“True! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! But why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them.”  Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart”

Once we talked today about how writers add suspense to their writing it made perfect sense why Mrs. Scales would chose Edgar Allan Poe and his famous short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” as our example text for this lesson. I have never read a more suspenseful story in my whole life.

It was easy to pick out how Poe had:

Used an unreliable narrator

Described the character’s anxiety and fear

Used vivid descriptions of dramatic sights and sounds

Repeated words, phrases, or character actions to build the suspense of the story. We easily picked out examples of each from the text and it was definitely suspenseful. We listened a second time to the story and it was even better the second time around.

There were several words in “The Tell-Tale Heart” that we didn’t know.  We received a vocabulary worksheet with the following words and had a few minutes to predict what we thought the words might mean. Now we can check to see how close our predictions were. The list of vocabulary words for “The Tell-Tale Heart” were:

acute – keen, sharp

conceived – think of

vexed – to annoy or anger

stifled – smothered, quieted

crevice – crack or opening

stealthily – cautiously, secret

audacity – bold, shameless, daring

vehemently – with intense emotion

derision – ridicule, mock, being made fun of

hypocritical – false, deceptive, saying one thing but doing something else.

We are also still working on conventions.  We reviewed our homework sentences for the proper corrections.

The first sentence needed corrections with the placement of commas, apostrophes for possessives, capitalization, and a title punctuation using the Big/Little rule.

If you’d like a young people’s reference book, read The World Almanac for Kids 2000.  (We were hand writing the sentence, not typing it so we had to underline The World Almanac for Kids 2000 instead of using italics)

The second sentence was written in big letters across the front board to show the right word usage, comma, and plurals corrections.

The 19^th Amendment was proposed on June 4, 1919; it was ratified on August 18, 1920, and gave women the right to vote. 

The third sentence needed commas to set of a series of items and a semi-colon to fix a run-on sentence.

In the 1920s, it was illegal to buy, sell, or drink alcohol; this was called Prohibition. 

Some people fixed the run-on without using a semi-colon.  Instead they put a period after alcohol and capitalized the t in this.  That was fine too.

We had two more sentences in yesterday’s homework.  In all there were 30 corrections that we needed to make, and the rules for why they each needed to be corrected can be found in the handouts in our English binders.  We were reminded to use our English binders while doing our homework tonight.  There are 26 needed corrections in tonight’s homework. The clues in bold print above the sentences even tell us what to look for.

Our root word today was ped or pod, which means foot.  We learned from the example words that a podiatrist is a doctor for the feet, a pedal is a lever pushed by the foot, and a pedestrian is one who walks by foot.