Mrs. Stubbs's English Blog: Happy Thanksgiving!

Welcome to Thanksgiving week! My, the year is flying past, and this is a week I always look forward to. How can you beat a 3-day work week and a 4-day weekend? Despite the short week, however, we continue to work on both our Shakespeare unit and our independent books. Both classes are doing essentially the same things, just with different texts, so here goes:

Both groups finished Act I in their Shakespearean play, and we're now dissecting it. They all have study guides, notes, and various activities to do. English 11 is spending more time in their seats, but they're doing more writing. I have them digging in and doing Cornell Notes, which is simply a system of note-taking developed by Cornell University. I like it because they use a lot of textual evidence. They are also going to be doing a Motif Project for Macbeth which will be done in groups, but each person is solely responsible for their own material, so the grades will be individualized and not dependent on the group. English 9 has been sitting, listening, reading, and doing a study guide with a few notes, but we've also been playing with words and lines, so I was able to take some pictures. One of the activities we did this week involved creating statues to go with certain lines from the Queen Mab speech which focuses on dreams. Here is some of what they came up with:

"O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on court'sies straight..."

"O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on fees..."

Ok, this one is a little disturbing, but the line is: "Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats..."

This was super cute! The line is: "Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love..."

On Friday they learned how to dance the Prevane before we read the masquerade party scene where Romeo and Juliet meet:

I have to say, your kids are really great sports and lots of fun to work with! They probably thought I was totally insane, but there has been lots of laughter and I'm hoping that they are enjoying the play. In my mind, that's half the battle. If they enjoy it, they're more willing to put in the effort for understanding it.

This coming week, we will continue the plays (I'm hoping to read through Act II), though Monday will be spent mostly on the computers. They are all going to create their second Reading Blog post for their independent novel (which they should be diligently reading, every night), and then English 11 will remain in the lab to work on the Motif project. There will not be any vocabulary this week.

As a side note, I was able to go to the Jets hockey game on Friday night and enjoyed a great Jets win. I love seeing them outside the classroom doing something they love, so what a joy to see so many of my students skating! I watched the hockey game, and then I found some of them skating on the rink next door. What a great night!