Last Week of Term Three

Here we are at the last week of term three...already!  Time really flies, despite it sometimes feeling more like a turtle than a bird.  I hope everyone remembers that the Term 3 grades are not the ones that go on the transcripts; they get combined with Term 4 to create a semester grade, and that is the one that goes on the transcript.

We've been busy in both classes, so here are the details:

• In English 9 we have completed Part 1 of To Kill a Mockingbird, and we're currently working on digging into the book to move past plot to the deeper levels.  I'm using two concepts called T3 and SCOUT to help us organize thoughts, and then we'll try a socratic seminar and a short analytical writing to find the most important aspects of the first part of the novel.  I told them that literature is like an ogre, which is like an onion - Shrek reference (they then wanted to watch Shrek, but I told them they could do that on their own time).  After we're done with this, we'll move on to Part II - hopefully by Wednesday.  They do have vocabulary to work on this week, as well.
• In English 11 we are working on an MLA research paper.  They picked a book and topic, then they formulated questions and took notes.  For those in class on Friday, I went over the idea of how to create a thesis statement.  This week we'll be finishing with the process of checking in notes, they'll check in their thesis statements, create a Works Cited page and share it with me on Google Drive, outline the paper, draft the paper on Google Drive, then share it with me and a peer.  I'm hoping to be done with the work time necessary in class for working on this paper this week so that we can move into reading the books next week.

I'm out for a conference at Cobo Hall on Chromebooks and Google Classroom on Wednesday so that I can be an expert on these wonderful machines I now have in my classroom.  I know that they'll be in good hands with any substitute teacher assigned to us.

Have a good week!  Ciao!


Last Week of Term Three by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.