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
