From Freshman Orientation through every single day of the first week of school, English 9 students have been told to READ THE BLOG everyday. Today students who scored a low score on the first vocabulary test were offered a chance to take a make up test for last week’s vocabulary test. Many students improved their test scores by several points. Those student who did not read the blog or follow the directions on their pass, are stuck with their original grades.  Read the blog everyday to make sure you don’t miss out on opportunities.

Students also read and discuss Mary Oliver’s poem “The Journey.” Mrs. Scales demonstrated a variety of reading strategies and annotation skills in a “think-aloud.” Students wrote examples of how they observed Mrs. Scales:

1. Previewing – Looking at the title of the poem and thinking about what a journey normally means
2. ReReading – Reading most lines of the poem more than once as she worked her way through the poem.
3. Questioning – Asking questions about what different words or phrases in the poem might mean.
4. Skimming or Scanning – looking ahead in the poem to see how many time the word though was used.
5. Summarizing – Reviewing a few lines of the poem together as a whole and then again when looking at what the first half of the poem meant.
6. Skipping an Unknown Word – melancholy
7. Living with Confusion – Not knowing what melancholy meant but not giving up, questioning who was giving bad advice.
8. Chunking – Taking a few lines of the poem at a time
9. Reading Closely – Interacting with the literal and figurative language of the poem.
10. Imagining or Visualizing – Describing “fallen branches and stones” in the street and “stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds.”
11. Comparing Text to Real-Life Events – Compared the phrase “tug at your ankles” to pulling her heart strings when she was in the Navy.

Students were assigned to read and annotate the poem “Digging” by Seamus Heaney prior to class tomorrow.