Final Week of Term Three

The school year is flying!  We're already concentrating on next year; both my students and my own personal children have scheduled for the 2016-2017 school year, which just seems crazy!  I love this time of year, though, because the weather starts to have more sunny days than snowy, and the birds come back, so there's always hope for renewal.

This past week my English 9 classes jumped into The Crucible, though not very far.  By now they can usually tell that I'm a history nut, so we do a lot of background knowledge before getting into a text.  They did a 10% Summary over an article about the Salem Witch Trials; I gave them notes on Arthur Miller; then they did a KWL (What do you know? What do you want to know?  What have you learned?) for McCarthyism.  Then we signed out parts for Act I of The Crucible and started the play.  Over the weekend I have them doing a Type 2 about the setting and work on some vocabulary.

So here's the schedule for this week:

• Monday - they'll turn in their Type 2's and do an SAT-style vocab. quiz, which means that they can use their vocab. worksheets and it's multiple choice, then they'll turn those in; after that, we'll do a Type 2 reflection on Miller's use of exposition writing within the play; finally, we'll continue forward with them reading their parts.
• Tuesday - we'll do some verbs; we'll continue reading Act I and doing the study guide, notes, and literary terms
• Wednesday - more verbs; more Act I with study guide, notes and literary terms
• Thursday - more verbs; I'm hoping to finish Act I by this day and finish the study guide, notes and literary terms, turning in the packet
• Friday - my plan is to finish discussion over Act I and pre-write for the Act I assessment which will be an essay.

As always, if we get behind, I'll change the calendar.  I tend to over-plan for my classes, rather than under-plan.  Also, I'm not sending home the play for them to read...yet.  I want us to get through Act I before starting to send them home on their own.

Finally, a note on the research papers:  they have turned them in, but I'm not going to be able to put them into the grade book until Term 4, for two reasons: it takes me 20 minutes to grade each paper on average, and I have around 140 of them; the second reason is that if someone has truly messed up, this gives us time to rectify the situation.  I will be going through the pile this week to identify those who have not turned one in.  If this is the case for your student, I will contact you to let you know.  If I have any that do not meet the requirements for the paper and need them to re-do it, I'll let you know. 

I hope everyone has a good week.  Enjoy your rainy Sunday.  Oh, and my Irish heritage in me wants me to make sure to say, "Sona la st. Padraig," which means "Happy St. Patrick's Day" in Irish.  May your week be joyful, full of blessings, and GREEN! (Those of you who know me, know that this has more than one meaning.)  Slan!

Final Week of Term Three by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at laurastubbs.blogspot.com.