We began our third week of English 9 today. Students were reminded to read the lesson plans every week to know when assignments are due and what we will be doing each day in class. Students were also told to check their grades in power school to make sure that any missing grades from late assignments get posted.

We had our first Writing Workshop in English 9 today.  Writing workshops begin with a mini-lesson, today’s was on the revision stage of the writing process. Revising does not mean correcting errors in the rough draft. Revision means rewriting the first draft to expand it or make it better, to reorganize how things are said, to further develop the piece of writing. After the mini-lesson Writing Workshop is class time devoted to writing. The entire Writing Workshop is time devote to writing. If a student finishes an assignment and simply can not find any additional ways to improve their current writing assignment they are to go on and work on some other piece of writing. This can be writing poetry, short stories, or letters, but it must be writing of some kind.

While students were writing Mrs. Scales reviewed individual reading levels with students or gave any student who had not completed the SRI on Friday a pass for AL tomorrow Tuesday to get the SRI taken. Reading levels were determined by a combination of the current SRI and the recorded scores from student’s 7th and 8th grade Star Reading assessments. Letters were sent home with any student who is currently reading below basic grade level. Parents are being asked to help students advance their reading levels by setting a goal for their child to read for at least 20 minutes a day outside of school. It was also suggested that parents and students spend time every day looking through “nonbook” reading materials, such as websites, pieces of mail, advertisement, and food labels, to demonstrate how important a part of everyday life reading is.

Finally, a vocabulary homework packet was passed out to any student who did not pass last week’s vocabulary test. The homework packet is due on Friday at the start of class. All students were reminded that this is week 3 so the vocabulary test on this Friday will include the new words for this week and a review of the past two week’s words. Everyone needs to study all week for Friday’s vocabulary test.