Manic Monday

It's that time of the 8th grade school year when language arts teachers are supposed to be working on research papers. Coincidentally (or is it?), Mr. Day's students are working on their PBL which involves a lot of research. Since I'm a fairly lazy guy without my own ideas, I thought it'd be a good idea (Note: it was Mrs. Butler's idea actually; I don't have my own ideas.) to piggyback on that already existing project and cover the research stuff that I need to:

> narrowing topics; coming up with research questions
> keeping track of sources on bibliography sheets
> taking notes with notecards
> paraphrasing
> avoiding paraphrasing
> crediting sources
> good sources vs. bad sources
> bibliography pages

Today, I went over the bibliography sheets, and we spent a lot of time with paraphrasing. Ask your student what it means to paraphrase and why it's so important to learn how to do it well. We also went over what research is (analyzing and synthesizing). Tomorrow, we'll get more into notes and how to know if a source is a good one. On Thursday, we'll spend some time in the library researching from books. Not the Internet. Books.

We also finished up the word parts for this group. Ask your student what the following mean:

-ine like in porcine and feminine
-ar like in stellar and circular
platy like in plateau and platypus and plate
fin like in final and infinitesimal (or infinite if you want to be less fancy)
The mathy hedron like in polyhedron and octahedron
ambul like in somnambulism, funambulist, and perambulate
-ous like in glorious, vivacious, and scandalous
And topo like in a topographical map or the word topiary

Finally, we went over our sentence quiz from last week, the one about compound subjects and verbs and compound sentences. The students got those back, and they're out of 20. A 14 would be the lowest score they can get to pass, but a lot of the students were in the 18-19 range on this one. If they missed 3, 4, and 5, by the way, you need to have a talk with them because those answers were on the chalkboard. If they didn't know that, they weren't paying attention a few minutes before the quiz when we were reviewing.

We looked at complex sentences today, too. A complex sentence is made up of an independent clause and a subordinate clause. A subordinate clause is a sentence with a subordinate conjunction (words like because, if, when, after, before, since, while, that) added to the front of it. We did some practice sentences and will do some more tomorrow.

Man, that looks like a busy day! More busy-ness tomorrow unless we're all devoured by the approaching ice monsters the meteorologist keep talking about.