Monday

So what do you think it means if they block your blog at school? I wasn't able to update this afternoon.

I did NOT send a letter home with the students today. Hopefully, I will send something home tomorrow. The students did get progress reports in their homerooms today, but there's just not a lot of information about what the grades means.

Today, we reviewed our word parts. Tomorrow is part one of our test, and it will be fifty old word parts. Wednesday will be 25 more old word parts and the 25 new ones.

We also spent a lot of time reviewing the poetry types and terms. Our benchmark assessment on that stuff is tomorrow. We tried to turn the definitions into visuals, and we looked at a lot of examples of epic poems, ballads, odes, sonnets, and elegies.

Some of the students took a short quiz on figurative language. The students who didn't have to take the quiz are the ones who turned in the Uglies take-home quiz last week. For whatever reason, a ton of students didn't turn that in.

Finally, we started work with a chapter from a book about the Lincoln assassination. The students are looking at how the author creates suspense in a story even though we all know how it ends and the way an author mixes fact and fiction in a historical narrative. Later this week, the students will be creating a dialogue between police and an eye witness to the assassination.