Can you believe it? Today is the first day of the final grading period for this school year. That means that we are 3/4 of the way finished with this school year.

We continued our unit on Magical Realism with our first Cold-Read Task. Today we read and annotated the first chapter of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Annotation:

Students were reminded that annotation is an active reading strategy that helps readers interact with the text as they are reading it. Annotation is a way to engage your mind in the activity of reading and thinking about what you are reading for better understanding. Along with noting and then looking up any unknown words, annotation includes identifying patterns, literary devices, ask questions, make predictions, or note anything else that may be significant in the text. Annotation is not simply underlining or highlighting test with no meaningful purpose.

The Day 2 handout was also provided in class today. The purpose of this is to give any student who thinks it may take extra time to complete the questions tomorrow in class a chance to work ahead as both Day 1 and Day 2 handouts will be collected for grading at the end of tomorrow’s class period.

It was explained that the questions are examples of the type of questions that are often asked on standardize testing. The questions have a part A and a part B.  Credit can only be earned on the part B portion of the question if the part A part of the question is answered correctly. The idea behind this type of test question is that the correct answer to part A should lead the student to being able to identify evidence or reasoning for the part B portion of the question. This tests the connection or reasoning of ideas and logic.