The First 6 Weeks of School

    Six weeks of school are behind us now! PreAP English seems to be rolling along. The new pacing guide's activities are keeping the students actively engaged in lessons that revolve around the theme of "justice vs. injustice". The main piece of this unit is Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Students have been practicing effective sentence structure and the correct use of quotations in writing as the language component. All of the students are using DIDLS (Diction, Imagery, Details, Language, Syntax) graphic organizers to help prepare them for a literary essay at the end of the unit.

 In world history, the year began with a geography unit. It was followed by a unit on the early Renaissance then the era of exploration. We're currently working on Absolutism and the later Renaissance period. Students completed a projects about various explorers last week which were both  informative and entertaining. 

    The novels class have been actively engaged in reading every single day. We've had a great  time!This week we're taking a break. We're watching Secondhand Lions starring Robert Duval (Boo Radley) then they're writing tall tales. These students are completing at least one novel every three weeks,  and they're completing two DIDLS and two projects during each 3 week period. Their Thinkbooks are filling-up fast! :-)

GREAT GATSBY Trailer (2012) Movie HD

Book Quotes

Create Story Cubes With Templates from Read Write Think

Create Story Cubes With Templates from Read Write Think

Common Core

With everyone focusing on the new Common Core Standards for ELA, I thought about looking through the suggested canon of works. The list is extremely varied and will cause a big shift in what each grade is teaching. Since our textbooks were not designed based on the CCS, I wonder if the state will be helping us to supplement our teaching materials? Who will decide which grade will be teaching a particular work? Will there be a pacing guide for each grade based on the end of year tests? The major shift will be for the students who are in the middle of the transition. For example, a student who studied Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade and should have Macbeth in 11th or 12th grade in our current COS, may miss this wonderful play because of the change. I like to "change it up," so I'm looking forward to studying some different works in preparation for working with the CCS. Here's a list of reading titles for middle and high school listed by the CCS:

6-8th Grade:

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott , 1869
•  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain , 1876
•  “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost , 1915
•  The Dark Is Rising by Susan Cooper , 1973
•  Dragonwings by Laurence Yep , 1975
•  Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor , 1976
•  “Letter on Thomas Jefferson” by John Adams , 1776
•  Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass , 1845
•  “Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940 by Winston Churchill , 1940
•  Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad by Ann Petry , 1955
•  Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck , 1962

9-10th Grade:

•  The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare , 1592
•  “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley , 1817
•  “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe , 1845
•  “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry , 1906
•  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck , 1939
•  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury , 1953
•  The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara , 1975
•  “Speech to the Second Virginia Convention” by Patrick Henry , 1775
•  “Farewell Address” by George Washington , 1796
•  “Gettysburg Address” by Abraham Lincoln , 1863
•  “State of the Union Address” by Franklin Delano Roosevelt , 1941
•  “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1964
•  “Hope, Despair and Memory” by Elie Wiesel , 1997

11-12th Grade:

•  “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats , 1820
•  Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë , 1848
•  “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson , 1890
•  The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald , 1925
•  Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston , 1937
•  A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry , 1959
•  The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri , 2003
•  Common Sense by Thomas Paine , 1776
•  Walden by Henry David Thoreau , 1854
•  “Society and Solitude” by Ralph Waldo Emerson , 1857
•  “The Fallacy of Success” by G. K. Chesterton , 1909
•  Black Boy by Richard Wright , 1945
•  “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell , 1946
•  “Take the Tortillas Out of Your Poetry” by Rudolfo Anaya , 1995

Books on my list...

Today I visited Barnes and Noble because I accidentally ruined my Nook charger. I couldn't help perusing the bookshelves while I was there! :) Anyway, I made a short list of books that I'm considering for my class library, and I asked the lady who runs the S9GS Library Book Fair to add some of these titles and some other fun stuff to the items that she brings to our book fair. Anyway, these are the books on my list:
Abarat by Clive Barker
Scat by Carl Hiaasen
Payback Time by Carl Deuker
SpellBound by Rachel Hawkins
A Long, Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Sophie and Carter by Chelsea Fine

  

Character Caricatures

My students are creating character caricatures about their favorite character from a novel, play, or short story using SP Studio <http://www.sp-studio.de/index.htm>.  My character's name is Roarke. He's from the "In Death" novels by JD Robb. Some of my students think he looks a bit like Rochester...

This is actually pretty fun!