Juggling Projects, Lessons, and a Lifetime of Learning

Now that we’ve made it halfway through our third quarter, I want to remind students and parents that DOING and FINISHING work is crucial for good grades. I just received students’ mugshots for this week and several were incomplete! We’ve been doing mugshot sentences every week since the second week of school. Please check FamilyLink to see how well your child did on mugshot 25.

We’re exploring our future selves, who we are, and who we’ve been. Everyone was given the task to find someone who is at least 50 years of age (or older) and compile quality interview questions that they can ask about that person’s past, present, and their future. What sort of BIG events have impacted us as a society and what little “big” things have altered our personal lives? There should be a minimum of ten questions for each category (past, present, and future), so at least 30 questions in all. They are due on Tuesday, February 25. (They should NOT have completed the interview prior to Tuesday; they will do that after they receive the next step in their assignment.)

Because teachers in the other content areas are focusing on more research-based work, we’re delving back into some creative writing—something I’ve missed and am thrilled to bring back to our classroom. At this time, students are to be writing a creative story that has something to do with making choices and how those decisions will impact the life / lives of the character(s). You’ll need to use dialogue and tag expressions, interrupt dialogue with appropriate tag lines and show you know how to use dialogue correctly in your writing. ***Please know that students were given notes in class and we had a discussion about dialogue and its correct usage, so they should have the information readily available!*****

            Think of a clever beginning and ending for your story and reflect on the recent poetry we’ve read in class to help guide you in this process (A Summer Day and The Road Not Taken). Consider how character(s) will have life changes but can’t see those changes or how what seemed like a simple decision impacted their entire life / lives until later, when they look back at the past. Stumped? Perhaps your character(s) receive their composition book in the mail 20 years from now and they realize some things that have changed over time, or perhaps that they did things that made their dreams impossible. That’s just an idea—what you really need to consider when writing a story is what makes this day different from any other day? Ask yourself that question when you develop your character(s) and figure out how you can draw from the idea that you come up with. That gives you your inciting incident (which is where our plot pyramid has something happen to bring us to the rising action).

It is also imperative that you use dialogue. Please don’t make the entire story dialogue, you just need to use it throughout the story so that it’s not all narration AND so you can demonstrate proper dialogue usage. You’ll be marked down if it’s all dialogue OR all narration. Find a balance and write your story. The length of your story should be what you believe an honors students should write, and you’ll be graded on a well-composed story, overall content, style, the ability to tell a clear concise tale, creativity, correct dialogue usage, and overall mechanics. Obviously it should have a beginning, a middle, and an ending. (An end is never ever THE END written as the last two words of a paper.)

Your final copy should be typed, double-spaced, and written in Times New Roman 12-point font with one-inch margins. It is due Thursday, February 27. Stories WILL BE SHARED with the class and open for public reading, so please make sure you do your best on this assignment—not only for the sake of your grade but to make certain you’re not embarrassed if you decide to slop together a creative story a few hours before it’s actually due.

Finally, in other news, I moved our test over figurative and literal meanings of the Robert Frost poem to Monday. We’ve discussed the poem in depth and talked about how we have literal and figurative meanings for a lot of things in life and how poetry can be a metaphor for something entirely different.

Remember that the Quarter Three Independent Reading Projects are due soon—March 3—so gather artifacts and be ready to present those when you arrive to class that day.

We’re still working on spelling and vocabulary words (Greek and Latin roots) each week, alternating every week. Due to the all-too-short week we just had, there was no test this week. Spelling words will be handed out on Monday, however, and the process will begin again.

As always, I appreciate all of the support from parents at home. Thank you for working with your child and communicating with me to help your child receive the best education possible. It’s been a wonderful year and I’ve enjoyed seeing the growth and progress that the kids have made.

Warmly,

Mrs. Gott

Your One Wild and Precious Life...

Students have been asked to get a composition book or journal (with binding that is NOT spiral, please) that will be PRIVATE. I ask that parents do not pry or ask to read the journals; I have promised to not look inside the journals as well. It’s an “on your honor” system in which my kids will record their thoughts, hopes, fears, dreams, secrets—anything and everything that is going on in their world at this age. They may write poetry, draw pictures, write stories, use it as a diary, make lists, and more. My hope is that they delve deep into their souls to write from the heart and put their honest and true emotions on the page. In the journal, students are asked to contemplate the prompt from the last two lines of the following poem from Mary Oliver. 

The Summer Day

by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself
  out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out
  of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and
  forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her
  enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and
  thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open,
  and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
  how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down
  in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how
  to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

As you can see, the prompt is: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

At the end of the year, each journal will be placed into a large manila envelope with each student’s name on the outside. The journals are meant to be a gift to their future selves because I intend to do my best to track down each student and mail them their journals in 20 years. (I realize this will be difficult, but I will do my best to find them.) By then they’ll be in their 30s—an age that seems so distant to them right now, so implausible. It’ll also be a time in their lives when they have experienced much more than they have now, and I’d like for them to be able to look back at what they were like at THIS age and see if they have fulfilled their dreams, broken barriers that they thought they couldn’t overcome, and I want them to have a better understanding of how the paths they’ve chosen in life have led them to where they’re at. When we make choices, we don’t know the consequences of the path that we are choosing until after we’ve traveled down that road, just like in Robert Frost’s poem, THE ROAD NOT TAKEN. 

As a sad but necessary side-note, if I suffer an untimely demise, I’ll have instructions for the journals on the box in which they’re stored. The box of “secrets” will go to someone from this class (or a student’s parent) who can promise not to open any of the envelopes and then to mail them out in 20 years from when they were given to me.

I’m really excited about this project and hope that my kids write about their desires and dreams and what they’re like at this age. I must confess that the idea is not my own, but something that a teacher did in a recent YA novel that I read; therefore I must give credit to Jessi Kirby and her novel GOLDEN for inspiring me to do what Mr. Kinney did for his students during their senior year of high school. 

The prompt goes along with our Essential Question: Who is the Future Me? As we are working on this project, students have been creating Life Maps and imagining themselves anywhere from age 40 – 110 (though they aren’t allowed to be senile). They’ve worked on their Life Maps in class for quite some time and they’ll be expected to present them to the class on Tuesday, February 4. 

They’re also going to create a Portrait Project and do a bit of self-examination, exploring their past, present, and future selves. I took photographs (much to their dismay, ha!!!) and they’ll be displayed with their writing. If you’d like to see the work of some Harvard graduate students who did something similar, you can go to www.bhs.edu/portraitproject and see what those people have written. Obviously my kids won’t be quite so philosophical, but for parents who are questioning what the project might look like, I encourage you to check out the URL.  

We’re nearly at the mid-term of third quarter, so everyone needs to make certain that they’re keeping up with their work and still striving to do their best each and every day. The time that remains for us as a class is waning, and I want us to continue working toward meeting individual goals and being successful.

As always, I appreciate the help and support from my kids’ families; I’ve got a wonderful group and I’m so fortunate to get to know my kids in the time that we share. We’ve become something of a small family of our own here in our classroom.

Warmly,

Mrs. Gott

Quarter Three Independent Book Project (historical fiction)

Quarter Three Independent Book Project

(historical fiction)

1.     Everyone has already had their book preapproved by me. You should now be reading the book so that you can plan your project.

2.     As soon as you finish your book, you’ll need to take an AR test on the computer. The test score will be a separate grade, so you want to make certain you don’t earn a zero because you forget to take your test! AR tests must be taken by March 3, 2014. (Yes, there is still plenty of time!)

3.     Create an artifact that is representative of the novel you’ve read. You are NOT to purchase an object, you must figure out how to create something unique to your character or time period or events—and, in doing so, you must use whatever resources and materials you can locate and put together in a professional manner to represent something significant from the story that you read. For instance, if I read a book about the Underground Railroad, I could make a quilt block (or even an entire quilt if I were feeling particularly crafty, I suppose!) that held clues to help lead slaves from one location to another. (Obviously this would have had to have happened in the book—you can’t simply INVENT something that has nothing to do with your story.) Be creative and imaginative! Think outside of the box; an artifact can be from the story’s setting, prominent characters, or even the plot (events).

4.     Artifact Creation Log: Keep a log of the date(s) and time(s) that you work on your artifact. Each log entry should include a neatly-written summary about what you accomplished during that time. Make sure to use complete sentences. Include not only your progress, but a reflection (in each entry) about how you believe the project is going. Are you experiencing any frustrations or roadblocks along the way or is everything going much easier than anticipated? Do you have anyone helping you? Are you enjoying yourself or are you wallowing in the depths of misery? As always, too much information is better than too little, and I expect quality log entries.

5.     Your artifact must be accompanied by a well-written summary of the artifact and clearly explain its association to the novel that you read. BE SPECIFIC. What have you created and what is its significance? What makes it important? How does it relate to the characters or setting or plot? Too much information is better than too little information. Your summary should be typed in Times New Roman, 12-point font with one-inch margins. It is due with the artifact and you’ll present both to the class on the due date. Order of presentation will be chosen by random-draw.

6.     The due date for the entire project and presentation is March 3, 2014. Everything is due when you arrive to class. If you are absent, it’ll be due when you return. If you have any questions, it’s better to ask them and clarify the project sooner than later. Please do not procrastinate!

7.     Projects will be scored using the following rubric:

·        Relevance of the artifact to the story

·        Creativity

·        Originality

·        Neatness / Appearance

·        Effort / Estimated Time Involved in Project’s Creation

·        Presentation

·        Summary (format, depth (thorough explanation of correlation to reading), appropriate voice, grammar, mechanics, overall ability to summarize)

·        Artifact Creation Log (please see requirements as noted above on number four)

Hamlet Exam (final exam / take-home essay)

Today, the students took a 20 question multiple choice exam over HAMLET. The test included short answers (which have yet to be graded) and it also includes the take-home essay question (with details below). We will discuss the essay portion of the exam in more detail tomorrow, as several students had questions and I'd like to discuss my expectations in greater detail and give them an opportunity to discuss ideas in class. They can and should use their scripts as a resource when composing their essay for this exam.

ESSAY QUESTION: HAMLET FINAL

*Make sure you use paragraphs, complete sentences, and a thesis statement that explains exactly what you’re going to prove to the reader. You’ll have an introduction, a body (generally a MINIMUM of three paragraphs), and a conclusion, and you can (and should) use examples from your own life, experiences, other literature, or similar situations to help explain the piece that you choose to write about (from the list below). Make sure to proofread and edit your writing. The final draft should be typed and double-spaced, written in Times New Roman 12-point font with one-inch margins. It is due on Wednesday when you arrive to class. Your essay will be shared with your peers, so don’t write anything that you don't mind sharing with people other than me.

 

You have learned that one theme in Hamlet is the difficulty people face in distinguishing between reality (what is) and illusion (what seems to be). Show how any one of the following illustrates that theme. Write a well-composed response that is in-depth and uses specific examples from the play to back up what your answer. Make sure you use your own words—do not simply copy parts of your script. Using your own words will help me know that YOU know what you’re talking (writing) about and that you’re not simply grappling to find an answer. Prove that you have a clear understanding. The choices follow:

A.    Hamlet’s misgivings about the ghost

B.     Ophelia’s misunderstanding of Hamlet’s behavior once he has seen the ghost

C.     Gertrude’s lack of knowledge of Claudius’s character (character being not the role he plays, but his moral fiber)

D.    Laertes’ willingness to accept Claudius’s explanation of Polonius’s death