On to Shakespeare!

Well, life wouldn't be interesting if there wasn't a bit of drama.  Last week we did a lot of group work and some of it even involved markers and poster board, and laying on the floor doing fun things, so I took some pictures 1st Hour to put on here.  Then on my way out of the building Friday, carrying mounds and mounds of papers, I evidently dropped my phone/camera out of my pocket and drove away leaving it in the teacher's section of the parking lot.  I only know this because Mrs. Sestak found it and called to let me know she has it (thank goodness for Mrs. Sestak!).  So I guess I'll have to post pictures on here next week instead.

As mentioned, last week we broke up the routines of reading, annotating, and writing essays.  We did a mini-unit comparing a small piece of non-fiction to the fictional short story "St. Lucy's", analyzing author craft and the differences between fiction and non-fiction when developing similar central ideas.  Instead of doing what we've been doing, they worked in groups to look at organization by taking dismantled paragraphs and putting them back together. Then they identified the central idea of their paragraph, and came together as a whole class to find the big overall idea of the whole passage.  We then applied the same techniques to the non-fiction piece.  Ultimately, instead of writing an essay, they created a Venn Diagram to compare our two pieces, and then wrote a paragraph comparing a similar idea between the two.  First through fourth hours created a group poster, while fifth hour each did their own.  It was nice to shake things up.

This week we're heading into Romeo and Juliet.  We'll do some motivational and background activities and information, then we'll start into Act I.  We will read the entire play together in school; while some students could handle taking much of it home to read on their own, many cannot.  Rather than have a chunk of the group not read it, we just do it together.  They will have some homework where they take portions of the text that we read in class home to do a close reading and annotation, but it will not be every night.  So here's the schedule for this week:

• Monday, 10/17 - I am out for the day with a personal appointment, but they have an assignment on Google Classroom for a Shakespeare Scavenger Hunt.  They'll use the Chromebooks in the classroom to do this.
• Tuesday, 10/18 - after doing a PSAT annotation activity, we'll do the background on Shakespeare and the English Renaissance.
• Wednesday, 10/19 - we'll review the preposition unit, then we'll do the literary term definitions and set up the note-taking strategy for R&J.  They'll be able to use their notes on tests and quizzes.  We're going to try to fit in the Prologue for Act I.
• Thursday, 10/20 - more preposition review, then we'll read Act I.
• Friday, 10/21 - preposition review, then we'll continue Act I.  I'd love to say we'll finish it, but past experience says that we won't be able to get it done that quickly.

So that's the plan.  Enjoy the warm weather through these few days.  You know you've had a warm streak when 55 degrees at the end of October sounds chilly.  Have a great Sunday!  Ciao!

 
On to Shakespeare! by Laura Stubbs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://laurastubbs.blogspot.com.