Today started off a little rocky as far too many students came to class without their homework or essay assignment ready to turn in.  When we had writing workshop on Wednesday, Mrs. Scales explained that there would be no class time after Wednesday to work on or print out essays.  She was very clear that if we didn’t get the final copy of the essay done on Wednesday that we could work on it at home, but there would be no class time on Thursday or Friday to print it out.  We had to come to class with the essay already printed out and ready to put in the tray today.  Not only did many people try to print out their essays at the last minute, someone had left letter head paper in the printer and everyone just kept printing on it.  Needless to say, this wasn’t our best moment.

It doesn’t matter what the assignment is, Mrs. Scales wants us to follow the written and verbal directions we have been given.  Every week we have a lesson plan to tell us what is due when.  Then each day we have this blog to review the most important bits of information that we covered that day in class.  We are even given time each day to review the blog in class.  Just showing up for class each day isn’t enough.  As students we have to be willing to take responsibility to use the information we are given and do things correctly and on time.  I sure hope everyone does better getting their homework in on Monday.

We used yesterday’s blog to finish the vocabulary worksheet we started yesterday.  All ten words were on the blog with definitions so that we could look at our predictions from yesterday and see what the words really mean.

There was a picture on the screen when we came into class today; it was CREEPY! It was easy to recognize the picture as a scene from the short story by Poe that we heard yesterday. We talked about how the picture shows suspense. There was also another giant piece of notebook paper on the board that said:

Suspense

1. Expression

2. Dramatic shadows

3. Jagged lines

4. Use of color

The picture is by an American illustrator named, Howard Simpson.

After listening to the story again, while looking at the creepy picture everyone took the AR test for “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Once we finished with the AR test, everyone had a choice as to do either an Acrostic poem or a comic strip based on “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Our root word today was mega.  Mega means extreme or a measure of a million. Example words were, megaphone, megaton, and megalopolis.

Mrs. Scales reminded everyone to read the lesson plans for next week and to do the “Quotation Marks with Dialogue” handout homework this weekend.