Thanksgiving Eve

The students finished their vocabulary quizzes today. I asked the students what they thought they got on the quiz as they turned it in and wrote that grade at the bottom. It'll be interesting to compare that to their actual grades, but a lot of them did tell me they thought they were in the A/B range. If that's true, it's because of their effort, paying attention and spending some time with the word parts at home. As I told my last class today--the grades they get on these vocabulary quizzes are the grades they want to get on them.

We looked at dialogue quite a bit today. We reviewed those quotation rules (ask your child what " " / CAPS / Punct / Left / End mark means) and went over the big dialogue rule--new paragraph for each speaker change. We looked at the same dialogue three times, once without any details for the settings and characters and two other times with different settings and character details. Hopefully, the students see the importance of writing dialogue with some style by doing the following:

1) Mixing up the patterns (not all beginning or end quotes)
2) Avoiding "said" to show the speakers' tone
3) Using expressions, gestures, and actions to give the characters some realistic movements
4) Using the setting

They're practicing (they'll have to finish Monday) with writing a dialogue between themselves and me about their language arts grade/effort. The dialogue will be in third person.

We also went over the poetry benchmark (see: data in yesterday's blog post). As I told the students today, very few of them knew what they poetry types were before we started. Some of them knew more about figurative language than others, but they were all in the same boat with their knowledge of epics, ballads, odes, sonnets, and elegies. 32% made A's on the test while 29% failed. They were in the same class, they had access to the same Powerpoint presentations, read the same poems, and had the same fantastic and good-looking teacher. The only difference? The students and their effort.

Next week, we'll be starting more informational reading and gradually move to persuasive stuff.