Tuesday Feb 28

Today was a day that I demonstrated my flexibility. We were supposed to start a unit on Malcolm X, but I got to the book room there were no more copies to borrow. So .... we're going to start Eye of the Dragon by Steven King.

We got a webquest to start. Basically an exercise in 21C learning to activate prior knowledge and to expand knowledge about the author. Here it is, as I had to do this on the projector

Everything will be awesome- the webquest you can email or hand in on paper (how odd that is for a teacher to see in 2017, by the way .... ) as it will be marked.

The rubric was on the screen today, and will be on the screen tomorrow.

Monday Feb 27

So ... I'm back!

We took today to take a peek at the Task Three presentation today.

We will start Malcolm X tomorrow!

Woo!

Tuesday Feb 21

I love long weekends. Hope you enjoyed yours!

Kind of a catch up day: some people wrote their quiz, others took time to get their paragraphs handed in and mostly everyone started with presentation research. 

Remember to sign up for your presentation on the paper at the back of the room. 

We won't have class again until Thursday, which half of it will be to given to working on your presentations while the other half will be our Malcolm X intro. 

Thursday Feb 16

Today we conferenced and then conferenced some more. Lots of great ideas and paragraph writing happening. Looking forward to reading them on Tuesday.

Wed Feb 15

In class today, we talked about paragraph writing and what makes a good paragraph (descriptive writing, formatting, style). 

We began conferencing with students about their paragraph assignment. The second half of the class will get the opportunity to conference before the second round of conferencing takes place. 

Chesser was emailed a rather cool looking document of the notes taken, too. He likes learning and teaching in the 21st Century. And team teaching is pretty cool, too!

The other thing that everyone should be thinking about is which topic / link you want to tag as yours for your presentation due Feb 27th!

Monday and Tuesday Feb 14

Well, I'm not there. That's just to make it official.

I'm at home, resting after emergency surgery on Sunday. Everything is ok, and I'll be back in a few weeks. In any case, I got this from Miss Perino, who is the teacher now.

We read "On the Sidewalk Bleeding". Talked about the discussion questions before filling in the answers independently. 

We also discussed what "Compare" and "Contrast" mean,  where compare notes the similarities, and sometimes differences, between two subjects. Contrast notes ONLY the differences.

We introduced to the idea of the Comparative paragraph and began to jot down ideas for what character student will compare ourselves to for the paragraph assignment!

Sounds like a great class!

Friday Feb 10

We are still working on the story unit. Today we read The Interlopers by Saki.

A good story.

We then saw the growing list of story ideas on the right-hand side of the blog for the Task Two Presentations, which are due on Feb 23, 24 and 27th.

Thursday Feb 9

It was a pretty cool class today. We took up the homework on "The Flying Machine" and then took up the terms, too.

We then read "Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allen Poe. What. A. Story. We got the questions, too.

 

I also posted the due dates for the Unit on the whiteboard at the front of the room. I'll move them and putting them at the back of the room tomorrow. It just works better for this class, I think.

I'll also be posting the due dates on the right-hand side of the blog, too.

Tuesday and Wednesday Feb 8

OK, so today we started the Short Pieces Unit.

We read the first story "The Flying Machine" by Ray Bradbury. He knew how to write a sentence, I can tell you.

We got the questions for that story, and we also got the terms




All good, all good.

I'll make sure I get the due dates up on the wall of the classroom and on this blog for everyone to see.

Monday Feb 6

So we started the class today - with the usual tracking sheets and course outlines.

I did get students to email me at Chesserhandin1 at gmail dot com. (I write it this way so that spammers won't get to that email address.

Please, if you haven't emailed me there yet, please do. I was just looking for something that I could read to find out about my students.

After that, we had a few minutes, so we talked about the course

Day one - Welcome!

Hey there!

We are in class together and I'm showing this off to you.

This will be a place for us to work on together and make it helpful for our needs.

Check this one out!