Tuesday

It's a lovely wintry day outside. We found that out during third block today when we had a fire drill. I hate losing that time, but it was nice to get a breath of fresh air.

We took a sentence quiz today. Only it's not even a real quiz! That's right. I lied to the students. I find that the students will take a grammar activity more seriously if I lie to them and tell them it's a quiz. It was practice with sentence combining, and I'll have some feedback ready for them tomorrow. Later this week, we're going to be adding complex sentences to our sentence combining toolbox.

We went over six of our new word parts today after going over last Friday's test. Here they are:

path means "feeling" like in sympathy and empathy.
a is a prefix that means "not" like in amoral or agraphia, a psychological disorder where people can no longer write.
nomy means "law" like in astronomy (the laws of the stars), economy, and taxonomy.
fid means "faith" like fidelity and infidelity and confidence.
caco means "bad" like cacophony, the antonym for euphony.
hetero means "different" like heterogeneous and heterosexual.

Speaking of the word part test from last Friday...I told the students today that if they don't like their score, they need to do something about it. First, they need to work with the words a lot more. But for their grade, I've told them they need to come up with something they can do with the words they missed that can earn those points back. It might involve drawing a picture, writing the words, making flashcards...something. They need to run their idea by me, and I will tell them whether or not it will work for a little extra credit to make up for points they missed on the test.

We worked on the school uniform article work some more today. We also looked at some propaganda techniques that advertisers and persuasive authors use, a lot which the students can find in commercials they see on the television. Tomorrow, we're going to be reading a really offensive article that uses a lot of the propaganda techniques.

If the students did not finish their school uniform work, they will need to finish that tonight.