Wednesday Dec 9--FLOCAB TIME

Welcome back to Clarklisto

Today we will begin Flocab.

we will start by showing a clip Hamilton in order to emphasize the fact that to do this project well, you have to read and you have to plan carefully what you do.

We will then spend time going over the ASSIGNMENT AND POSSIBLE THEMES.

We will show a few examples of final products and field questions you have regarding our expectations.

You will fill out the partner form and will choose a partner with whom you can work well.

You will then get to work reading the text and finding an article about the topic you and your partner have chosen.

HW Read, underline and annotate article (each paragraph needs at least 1 annotation)

You may count the reading of the article as log time toward your 150 minutes due on Monday.
Here is the link to find an article about your topic.
http://www.history.com/

If you already have an article from class from this website, please search for another article about the topic on a different website--pay attention to the source though--it should be a reputable site.

Tuesday 12/8

Today we finished going over the slideshow and then looked at the songs and discovered the purpose of a chorus/refrain and ideas about the ways to organize a song.

HW: Read/log/post it and be ready to block tomorrow.

Monday 12/7

Today we will work with sounds in poetry.  Here is the slideshow we will look at first, then you will look through your own poem to identify any of these sound devices within those. Tomorrow we will work with your songs.

I collected logs and we started new ones for the week of 12/7-12/14.

HW: Print the lyrics to your chosen song from last week and read/log/post it

Friday

I checked you annotations while you read for 10 minutes.  I noticed many people went through the motions but didn't really dig in and do the hard work they needed to for the second read so we spent time in class doing that.  I asked students to remember how we listed the word associations we had with house, horse and hound from "Questions" yesterday.  We discussed the fact that these words were important to the understanding of the poem and that we knew their definitions but the word associations lead us to a deeper understanding of the poem.
Then students were instructed to highlight metaphors and similes from their poems in 2 different colors and keep a legend (for example metaphors are yellow, similes are blue).  Then students circled in pencil the words they felt were significant to the understanding of their poems and then began word associating on the page.  the last 5 minutes were spent working with a partner.

HW: Read/Log/Post it Logs collected Monday be sure to tally minutes and pages
and continue "digging in" to those circled words.

Thursday 12/3

Today in class you read for 15 minutes. You then took out your blue sheets with the literary devices defined.  We finished the hard work of articulating why/how similes and metaphors are different. It is so much more than taking away the like or as--it boils down to the fact that a metaphor is stronger because all the qualities of one object are transferred to the other object of the comparison--remember our discussion of Juliet is like the sun versus Juliet is the sun.

We then read Question by May Swenson. The first read through we just tried to get a sense of what the poem was about and the rhythm of the poem. The second time through we started to identify possible metaphors, words that needed to be defined, associations we had with words, lines we struggled with etc... We then read a third time with different eyes and new meanings started to appear everywhere!

HW: Go to Monday's post and find a poem from your class' anthology and print it out (just the poem you have chosen not the whole anthology) or open your reader's notebook to take notes in your reflection section (if this is your option, include title and author of the work).
Now perform 2 reads of the poem. I will know this work is done because I will see all sorts of thoughts written on the paper about what words/lines might mean. Also you should mark any and all metaphors and similes you see.
Also read/log/post it-logs due Monday

12/2

Today I checked your responses from yesterday that should have been in your Readers notebook.  I graded this so if you were out, please take a look at yesterday's post and be sure to hand this assignment in to me.  I also encouraged students to check powerschool as grades are pretty current and the windo is shutting for old assignments to be turned in.
In class we discussed the assignment and the necessity to read titles, and to unpack our responses. We then did a brain dump and discussed literary devices we could remember.  I handed out the worksheet with the 12 we will focus on and we began by discussing the best known 2--simile and metaphor.
HW: read/log/post it--logs collected Monday.

12/1

Today we read for 15 minutes, kept post its and logged that time.
While computers were booting up, we found the reflections section of our Reader's notebooks and began by putting today's date on the page and finishing the sentence stem "the most difficult part of yesterday's activities was...."
We then told what criteria we based our selection on yesterday. In other words, why did you choose the poems you did? How did you select one over  the other?
Next we found our poems on the poetry anthology for each class (see yesterday's post for the link) (hint use ctrl F on pc or command F on a mac to search for your poem's title). We wrote a new part of hte entry that identified the poems we chose by writing the following:
I chose "     " by          and "        "  by       .

Next we were instructed to identify the line/word or image that we liked best from each of our two poems.  We first had to read each poem 2 times then we needed to start the response with the following:
In "         " by       I liked the line/word/stanza, "                   ".  Here is why......

DO this for BOTH poems.

HW: finish in class writing if you did not do so in class or if you forgot your readers notebook, transfer what you did in class to that.  Reading logs will be collected on Monday.