Wednesday That Seems Like Tuesday

Sorry this is late--chess club night.

Today, we took a trip to the library to pick up our new novel--Fever 1793.

It's historical fiction, all about the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793. Our esteemed media specialist Mrs. East talked a little about yellow fever while we were in the library, and she threatened to show the students some gross pictures. I'm not sure why she has a collection of gross yellow fever pictures. Maybe she's weird. There's no reading due tomorrow. We'll take it slow initially, and the students only need to get through chapter 4 (less than 30 pages) by Monday.

We looked closely at five more word parts. See if you can guess what these word parts mean! You can leave your guesses in the comments.

sanct is found in words like sanctuary and sanctum.

man is found in words like manufacture, manicure, and manual (opposite of automatic).

petr is a word part found in the words petrify and petroleum. If you're the religious type, the apostle Peter's name also means the same thing as this word part. Jesus wanted to build his church on him.

mir is found in words like miracle and mirror.

And rect is found in words like correct, direction, and rectangle.

With reading/writing, we reviewed the differences between showing and telling in narrative writing. We used Truman Capote's story "A Christmas Memory" (the story we started before winter break) to look at what good authors do to create experiences with memoirs. On Friday, the students will be doing an ISTEP prompt that is a memoir, and hopefully, they'll be able to use some of these strategies to make their writing more powerful.

Homework: Nothing tomorrow, but I did collect "The Road Not Taken" poetry work today. There were quite a few students who didn't have it. Also, I need the Walk Two Moon novels back. A lot of students didn't have those either.