Research Begins!

Wow, last week was incredible...and not in a good way!  I'm sure every parent has heard by now, but we spent three days with our technology a mess at the high school.  This meant: no computers; no grades/attendance (online) some days; no copies, except for small amounts on a small one in the office.  For a building which has been shifting more and more toward an online world, this was rather devastating.  Despite the problems, however, we made it through and even got some things done!  What we managed to accomplish:  we worked on verbs; we finished reading the Temple Grandin text and are preparing for the end-of-unit assessment; we practiced formulating questions for research and picked tentative topics; we watched a film-clip of the movie about Temple Grandin and then watched a Ted Talk by the lady, herself.  I think we still had a good week.

Here's what I'm behind on, however: updating grades; making sure attendance was correct; the online calendar, updated and edited.  I'm hoping to spend at least part of my Sunday doing this.

So here's what's coming up this week:

• Monday - we'll plan and pre-write for the end-of-unit assessment over the Temple Grandin piece.  They'll have a worksheet to fill out.
• Tuesday - we'll write the end-of unit 5-paragraph essay.
• Wednesday - vision/hearing testing (so we've been told) is happening, and that usually means my 9th graders, so I assume my classes will be doing this.  Then we'll go to the library so that our media specialist Mrs. Brakel can guide them through the online resources for research available through the school website.
• Thursday - they'll get the research packet which contains directions and resources for the research project.  We walk them through every step of research in order to ultimately write a MLA Research Paper.  It's not a quick process.  If time, they'll begin the process of working on generating questions and learning to vet sources for quality information.
• Friday - Since all we were able to accomplish toward PSAT practice last Friday was creating accounts, we'll try to do the actual diagnostic test on Khan Academy.

They will not have a lot of homework from me this week.  We're at an in-between period between units; once we begin the note-taking process the following week, they'll have some things to do at home.

I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their weekend and has a great week.  Ciao!


Research Begins! by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at laurastubbs.blogspot.com.