We looked at one of my favorite poets today--Pablo Neruda. He wrote a collection of poems called Odes to Common Things, and the poem we looked at today was called "Ode to the Apple." He must really like apples. We broke the poem down stanza by stanza and then looked for figurative language. They also answered a constructed response question.
There was a very short quiz on The Uglies. The first question was "Tell me something that proves you have read to at least page 96," so if they don't do well on this quiz, they just aren't doing the reading. Watch for that quiz score (Uglies Quiz 4) to see if your child is staying on track.
We reviewed descriptive writing and looked at an excerpt from our novel where the author describes some river rapids to see what good descriptive writing looks like. We're focusing on showing instead of telling with our descriptions, and the students are currently writing about a "terrifying place" that I randomly gave them. Some of them are writing about a dentist's office, haunted houses, cemeteries, abandoned barns. It's an exercise in showing the setting to their readers and creating an experience and a mood. We'll finish up with those tomorrow and compare the work to an earlier description that they wrote.
They also had the vocabulary word part quiz. I haven't graded them yet, but it's pretty obvious that a lot of students just aren't doing the work needed to learn these word parts. Out of 100 questions (that's what all the word part quizzes will have from this point on), some students only answered about 20. I even had a "definition bank" on the board for them to use, but if they don't put any work into it, they're not going to learn them.
Students should read to page 120 in The Uglies tomorrow.
Oh, I'm still not sure how many people are reading this. If you could drop me a comment (just to say hi!), I'd appreciate it!
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