Friday

Let me be honest. I don't like teaching on Fridays. They're bad teaching days. So are Mondays actually. I don't think going to a three-day week is the answer necessarily (we have far too much work to do) but students definitely don't want to work on Fridays. I was very disappointed with the effort of a lot of my students today. I still have a lot of students who aren't even pretending to try.

We started with a W2M (my abbreviation [brev! word part!] for Walk Two Moons) quiz over the reading. The questions weren't difficult; in fact, a lot of them just asked for opinions, guesses, and predictions. We used the quiz as a launching pad for some class discussion. By Tuesday (see announcement below), the students need to have read to page 120. It's not a ton of reading for that many days, but I want to take it slowly so that we can dissect the story together.

They also have been assigned a character from the book--Sal, Phoebe, Sal's mom or dad, Gram, Gramps, Mr. or Mrs. Winterbottom, Mary Lou, Ben, Mrs. Partridge, Margaret Cadaver, or the lunatic--and will be making a poster for Wednesday. I'll provide the paper, and they'll work on including the following:

--a picture of the character (colorful)
--character traits
--some symbols important to the character
--1-3 quotes about the character (something said by them or said about them)
--a thinking bubble showing what that character's thoughts, concerns, hopes, dreams, or whatever might be
--a paragraph at the bottom that makes a prediction about the character

We finished one of the zoo articles and had some time to do the worksheet breaking down the author's claims, support, and counterarguments. We also looked a little at how persuasive arguments sometimes use opinion in their writing.

Next week, we'll be looking more at persuasion. By the end of the week, we'll get into the dark side of persuasion--bias, propaganda, lies--and look at advertisements and examples of slanted writing. The students will also continue to work on their persuasive essays about me.

Announcement: Students will be Acuity testing (computer test with laptops in my room) on Monday. There's nothing they need to do at home to prepare for this except get enough sleep. I know my students will do their very best on the test.