Late Wednesday Post

With chess club and the progress report deadline, writing a blog entry slipped my mind! Whoops! I'm not sure if too many parents are reading this anyway, but I've promised myself I'll stay consistent.

We started dialogue today. This should be review from previous years, but throughout my career, I've noticed that 8th graders have problems with dialogue. It's important, too. If you look at ISTEP writing samples, the ones those ISTEP people (ISTEP people, by the way, do have horns) give 5's and 6's usually have something about using "effective dialogue" in the description of why they deserve 5's and 6's. Also, dialogue is one of the ways writers can SHOW about characters. We learn about real people by what they say and how they say it, so our stories will be more realistic if we can characterize through dialogue.

We looked at the big five dialogue rules--quotation marks around direct quotes, capital letters for first words of quotes, punctuation between explanatory words (the "said" part) and the quote, the placement of that punctuation mark before the quotation mark, and appropriate end marks--and then looked at patterns and examples for beginning, end, and split quotes. We'll continue practising the patterns before writing dialogue on our own.

We also did a little character descriptive writing. The students had to turn a boring telling sentence ("____ is tired." ) into a showing description.

Finally, we read three elegies. The students scoured them for figurative language, good diction, and imagery, and they figured out the rhyme schemes. Tomorrow, we'll discuss what an elegy is and take a closer look at the poems. The poems (which you can find on the Internet):

"Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe
"The Death of the Bell Turret Gunner" by Randall Jarrell
"The First Snowfall" by James Lowell

Check tomorrow's entry for a definition of elegy.

Upcoming stuff: Students need to read to page 268 in Uglies by Friday. That'll be my next quiz. Students have a take-home quiz with a little writing assignment to turn in tomorrow. The students also have an ode to write by Friday, but I might give them extra time for that or make that part of a larger poetry collection assignment.