Last Year/This Year

We finished watching our James Bond movie, and returned to our poetry unit.

We began by brainstorming how we feel the day before the first day of school, what we think about, and what issues tend to be in our head every morning before we go to school.  We found that some of us have social reasons and concerns, while some of us have academic ones.

We then read the poem "Back to School Last Year/Back to School This Year" and we noted powerful words/phrases from each section.  We then discussed which emotion we thought the poet wanted us to feel in each section.  We agreed that the first section was primarily focused on nervousness and fear, while the second section seemed more confident and calm.

We concluded by summarizing the poem in a couple of sentences.  We will write our own "Last Year/This Year" poems next class.

Term End Conversations

We have begun our Term End Conversations, and our James Bond movie to celebrate the end of a very successful first term!

While the class is watching "Casino Royale," I am conducting one-on-one interviews in the hallway.  Students are being asked to share with me what they think worked well for them in first term (related to both achievement and behaviour) and what they would like to work on in term two.  Together, we are setting goals for each student and for me, so that we have a successful second term.

We will conclude the film next class, and finish up conversations as well.

Creating an Expository Paragraph Plan

We spent the beginning of our class today completing Term One reviews.  Students will use these reviews in our Term End Conversations next week, to help determine an appropriate letter grade and work habit designation.  Students have been asked to consider where their strengths are, and which areas they need to improve, related to both behaviour and achievement.  Mentors have been asked to consider strengths and areas for improvement, overall.

We then began to construct a plan for an expository paragraph on the poem, "Television."  The topic for the paragraph was as follows: Discuss the theme of the poem, "Television".  We created a topic sentence together, and then we began to practice using text evidence as support for this topic sentence.  We will complete these outlines next class.

Television!

We spent the first part of today's class considering some of the things we discussed last day, related to television.  Students worked in small groups, and determined with their group what they believed to be the most influential aspect of TV on society.  This discussion led into our poem reading today.

We read "Television," written by Roald Dahl, and groups were responsible for summarizing one section of the poem.  Once groups had produced a two sentence summary of the section, they wrote their sentences on poster paper and then presented these to the class.

At the conclusion of class, groups created theme statements, plus recorded evidence to support these theme statements, for the poem.  We will share these at the beginning of next day's class.

The Pros and Cons of Television

We began our class with a debrief of the final section of "No Boring Parts Allowed."  We agreed that this was a poem about a guy (or girl) who appreciates high-intensity, action-packed stories and who has no time for slow spots. 

We then made a list of all the things we perceived to be positives about television, and a list of all the negatives.  We talked about these lists, which were fairly balanced in number.

We then read a poem called, "Jimmy Jet and his TV Set" about a boy who watches so much TV he turns into a television set.  We discussed the author's use of hyperbole and rhyme and we will construct a theme statement for this poem next day. 

No Boring Parts Allowed!

Today, we practiced our ability to make predictions using pictures, viewing three images which seemed to come from action movies.  We then added the title of our poem, "No Boring Parts Allowed" to our prediction, and we figured that the poem would probably be about an action-movie fan who does not appreciate when things get slow in movies.

We then read the first section of the poem together, and Ms. Barsky shared some strategies she uses to help make sense of poems when she reads them.  After reading the first section together, we worked to summarize the main idea of the section, as well as note the surprising twist at the end of the section.  Students then worked with their mentors to try to figure out the other sections.  We will debrief section three next day.

News Articles... Done!

We spent today's class in the computer lab, where students were asked to complete a typed, final copy of the news feature article.  If you were not able to complete the article today, please ensure that it is completed for the end of the week.

A reminder of the criteria:

• an opening paragraph that contains the 5 Ws and a hook
• a middle that contains facts and two quotations
• an ending that summarizes the event
• proofread for spelling, capitalization, punctuation and sentence structure