Monday, Monday

It was so good to be back with my students today. Man, I miss those little doofuses during extended weekends!

We did some more dialogue review today, looking at a poorly written dialogue with bad mechanics (no paragraphing, missing punctuation), a structurally correct but boring and predictable dialogue, and finally a well-written dialogue (if I do say so myself) with good action words, gestures, descriptive details, and variety. Then, the students wrote their third-person dialogues between them and me.

We graded the vocabulary test from last week. That's right. I was lazy and didn't feel like doing it myself over the weekend. That's the real explanation. I was going to type that grading the tests in class forces them to look at the words again, but that would have been stretching things a bit.

We looked at seven word parts for our new list:

osteo means "bone" like in osteoporosis (sorry, no easy-peasy word for this one)
ornith means "bird" like an ornithocopter (or this one)
polis means "city" like Indianapolis or metropolis. The word police also comes from this word part.
dia means "across" like diameter, something they should know from math class.
acro means "high" like in the word acrobat. I suffer from acrophobia, by the way.
derm means "skin" like hypodermic from an earlier list. I like pachyderm though.
And zo means "animal" like zoo. There. That makes up for the lack of easy-peasiness earlier.

We had a chance to introduce persuasive writing with some reading from the textbook. We very briefly looked at Aristotle's ideas about ethos, pathos, and logos (persuading with ethical appeals, emotional appeals, and logical appeals) and went over what argument, claims, and support mean for our purposes. Tomorrow, the students will practice doing some persuasive writing with an assignment that ties in with Uglies and will probably serve as a final test type thing with that book.

Tomorrow is also our library day. Students will need to return Uglies, and we'll be starting a new novel called Walk Two Moons. I think the students will like it if they give it a chance.

Oh, I almost forgot! They do have homework. They need to watch some commercials and write a paragraph about one of them. In the paragraph, they need to include the thing/idea that is being "sold," who the intended audience for the commercial might be, what claims the advertisers make, what support is used, and what other ways the advertisers use in their attempts to persuade.