Monday

First off, I'd like to apologize for my handwriting on the progress reports that I sent home today. I write like a small child. Not even a regular small child. No, I write like a small child who has broken both of his arms falling out of a hot air balloon. It's not pretty. As always, if you have any questions, please let me know by calling or emailing. Those progress reports need to be signed and returned by Wednesday, by the way. There's some grade information all the way at the bottom of this entry.

We took a quiz on the weekend novel reading. It wasn't a very good quiz, and I'm not proud of it. We discussed some of the stuff that happened in the book very quickly. They will need to finish the novel by Friday. We'll be turning it back in soon because there's another teacher who wants her students to read it.

We spent some time reviewing sentences with compound subjects and verbs and the three ways to make compound sentences. There are a few of my students (a lot of the same ones who have low grades on the progress report I sent home today) who don't believe me when I say that this stuff is important. They aren't paying attention or giving it their best effort. Things will not end well with them.

Finally, we reviewed a lot of the terms from our persuasion unit last semester and started work with two conflicting articles on school uniforms. Students are looking for the authors' use of logos, pathos, and ethos as well as the elaboration techniques (the D.R.A.P.E.S.). They will also be completing three constructed responses over the readings.


The progress reports:

We'll have more writing grades soon. The story was an in-class ISTEP writing graded with their 6-point rubric. The effort on that wasn't great for a lot of the students.

The reading--that's mostly in-class work. Some of the students lose things that they're working on or don't get things finished and turned in. There are really no good excuses for not having an OK "reading" grade.

Indy read covers the at-home reading stuff. It seems that a lot of the students think they can do well in my reading/writing class without doing any reading. I hope this progress report convinces them otherwise.

And the vocabulary...the first grade is just if they took good notes. That should be a 25/25. The quiz from Friday is on there. I have a lot of students getting A's and B's and a lot of students getting very low F's. The more they put into it, the better those grades will be. My recommendation hasn't changed--they need to spend a little time with the word parts every night.

Here's a picture of a cat with something on its head: