My apologies for leaving you update-less for so long. But! we have been moving & grooving here in English 10. Since Ms. Carder's send off in April, we have have conquered this year's Smarter Balanced Assessment, earned a pretty-sweet upcoming field day, and dove head-first into my/our first ever Passion Projects. 

I've been a bit crazy with the revolving door and endless parade of lovely and wonderful new graduates, but 208 is still rocking with some big-time intellect and ideas. 

​Here's where we began:

• From there, we brainstormed and wondered.  
• We talked note-taking and how to Google. 
• We researched and completed Discovery Notes and focused on just...learning, acquiring or refining knowledge, or deepening skills. 

Now, we are off and on to final project work days. (Click here for task sheet.) You guys are coming up with really interesting ideas, and I couldn't be more excited to see them come to fruition! Like, I'm talking live guitar, sculpture, the concept of infinity, the boundaries of our universe, and psychological experiments. Bring it. 

Next week, we'll get organized and present our projects. Soon enough you'll be riding into the sunset and Junior year, so stay the course, guys...you've had a great year!  

Hey guys!
I have had so much fun these past few weeks, and I think The Glass Menagerie was an awesome play for us to read and study. Thank you for letting me try new things and become a better teacher—I feel like we learned a lot together. The files that I have attached here are the graded work for the unit, and below are the directions:
 
Directions!

1) Anticipation Guide: For each statement, tell whether you agree or disagree by marking an A or a D on the line. Then provide one or two sentences explaining your choice. Be prepared to defend your answers.

2) As You Watch/Read: Read from scenes 1-3 and answer the questions in complete sentences

3) Sketch a Scene: Pick one image from the play and draw it.
Ex: The dining room, fire escape, characters, symbols (glass menagerie, typewriter)

4) Relationship Sketch: For each arrow you must have 2 sentences. One sentence must be a line from the play and the other is your interpretation. How do these characters relate to one another?
            What is their relationship?
            How do you know?

5) 442 #1: 442 Scene 4

6) Paragraph “Easter Activity”: Write one paragraph (5 sentences about one of the questions)

7) Most Critical Moment: Identify the critical moments (1st box = quote) of the play and explain how they function to the meaning of the work as a whole. (2nd box = explanation of important quote)

8) “As You Read #2”: Write down one question about scene 6

9) Memory Play: **See “Tips” paper next to assignment, and remember the Memory Play cover sheet

10) Sketch a Symbol: Pick 3 symbols. In the first box, find a quote in the play that talks about the symbol. In the second box, explain what that object symbolizes. What does it represent/stand for—NOT what does it do.
 
**Put your name on all activities!!!
*** If you have not turned in / have missing grades for the symbol station activity or previous learning logs, talk to me
 
 

Check back soon for updates from Ms. Carder, our super-duper awesome student teacher from Shepherd University!

Hooray for a great week!

I'm quite proud of the progress you've made with our short story unit. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the work you're currently doing -- small group collaborative discussions about a text, intentional annotations, strategies for inferring meaning, some pretty awesome Socratic seminars, and a creative project meant to extend your understanding. 

A cherry on top, a formative assessment dealing with thematic complexities. Go team. 

Additionally, we welcomed Miss Carder this week! She's lovely and smart and I'm quite excited to be to hosting her. Please make her feel welcome and continue to be your awesome selves. 

Here are the handouts from the week: 

Picture This freeze frame 

Bananafish assessment 

*Check back soon for bananafish freeze frames! 

Last week, we got after our anchor story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" by J.D. Salinger. It's the most challenging and demanding story we've read to date. It's deeply weird and a bit disconcerting. 

We spent at least one day inferring meaning from important sentences from the text. You collaborated with your small groups to suss out what the sentences might tell you about character, setting, situation, and conflict. It was a nice day of thinking and discussion. 

Otherwise, it took a couple of days to get through the reading before we began the A Perfect Day for Analysis activity, which requires you to "claim" one aspect of this story to closely examine. 

This week, we're returning to Bananafish and getting into a seminar, a lit analysis activity, and an iPad photo challenge. 

This week, we also welcome our new student teacher Miss Carder! Please make her feel welcome and show her your awesomeness. 

Here's the skinny on this penultimate week of February: 

Monday: "Why Don't You Dance?" by Raymond Carver (a wonderful & wacky story, eh?)
Tuesday: Group annotations & 442 of story
Wednesday: Socratic seminar (You guys Beyonce-ishly slayed it!)
Thursday-Friday: Benchmark

Oh, and there was an actual double rainbow this week in Martinsburg. Shout to Eli M. for tweeting me a pic. 

Here's to hard work and the weekend! 

Great progress this week! The most fantastic thing that happened was student-choice reading. Holy smokes am I excited about this. I've seen the best focus I've seen all year with independent reads, and I'm excited to see where this goes and how it grows. I'm very proud of you, and I'm so happy to have you reading what you WANT to read. 

Here's what we did this week: 

On Monday, we talked about being a person in the world. We worked together to fill out these alpha boxes with universal theme topics like acceptance, betrayal, commitment, determination, and so on...

Tuesday, you guys had a sub and you spent some time reading and then watched a TED talk on connectedness and loneliness. 

Wednesday, we double rainbow-ed it and practiced identifying theme with images. 

Thursday, it was The Story of an Hour plus annotations and a 442. 

And today, Friday, we either built theme fortune tellers, finished up and shared out our 442s, or elected for an on-the-fly (and very successful) Read What You Want Day (YES, 5th period!). 

I'll take it. Good work everybody. 

Since I last updated and checked in here, a lot has happened. Like, A LOT of snow. Mega, mega snow. It was beautiful and relaxing, but now we're back at it. You've since finished up your Timeline Writing Projects, fine-tuned and turned them in, and now we're off and running in a short fiction unit. 

As mentioned in class, I'm quite excited to be changing it up and coaching you up in close reading. So far, you guys are rocking it! 

Because it's Friday night and I'm updating from home and I don't have our official unit text packet in front of me, I'll go ahead and link you to what we've covered this week. 

This week, you learned a BRAND NEW text analysis strategy called 4-4-2. You took notes on the strategy, and then as a class, we applied it to the song Long Black Veil, which many of you were surprised and delighted by (in a dead lover kind of way anyway). 

We also read a lovely, sad, and somewhat mind-bending story by Haruki Murakami called "On seeing the 100 percent perfect girl one beautiful April morning." We, of course, worked together to 442 it, and we shared our very best notices and questions. 

We ended our week together by heading to our beautiful media center to search for books you GENUINELY might want to read. Mrs. Fleming pitched some info to you (isn't she delightful?), and we used your STAR scores to set your course. A lot of you walked away pretty excited about your new books! 

​It was a great week in English 10. Kudos to you all! 

Not too much to report for the week except hard work. That's right: hard work! That's exactly what you guys did this week. 

You worked hard at: 

• Analyzing the Gary Provost mentor text
• Crafting your own GP inspired paragraph (and man, were there some good ones)
• Creating additional paragraphs independently
• Practicing peer review
• Revising a paragraph for detail, description, and varied sentence structure

Coming up this week: finishing up this Timeline Writing Project and taking another crack at the STAR test. (Oh, and maybe some snow). ;) 

What a great week back! 

This week we hit the re-set button and geared up to do some reflective writing. We started chipping away at the Your Year in Review timeline project, and completed our first two paragraphs. 

We used this mentor text by George Saunders to kick things off. 

I've reminded you over and over why we're doing this: to practice writing (remember basketball or instrument analogies) and to nudge our writing toward a more mature style. Many of you are remarking on how you feel more comfortable writing for longer periods of time, how your development and description has improved, and for a few of you, how you've learned to make your stories and experiences "come alive." Wow! I'll take that as a win. 

Stay the course, kids. You're doing great. 

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