Today we took advantage of the great word mosaic site, wordle.net, to help identify words we may be overusing in our writing. Wordle creates attractive pictures from text, with the most frequently-used words appearing the largest. Students copied the text of one of their postings into wordle, created a mosaic, then circled the high-usage words. [...]
Continue Reading 2 comments January 29, 2010
Today students wrote their first persuasive letter based on the attached Persuasive Writing Task. Homework for tonight is to finish the letter. Please remember to include your brainstorm when you turn it in tomorrow. Also, don’t forget to work on the blog posting assigned Monday and due next Tuesday. This is the assignment requiring that [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 28, 2010
Today students worked with a partner to brainstorm what they would write for this persuasive prompt: Your school district is thinking about lengthening the school year by starting two weeks earlier. Do you think adding extra days to the school year will improve education? Write a letter to the editor of your school newspaper that [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 27, 2010
Today we read silently at the beginning of class and then went over last night’s homework on nouns (English Workshop, pages 97-98). After that, we continued discussing the characteristics of good persuasive writing. I also introduced a new blog posting assignment, which will be due next Tuesday, February 2: Imagine that you are an author [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 26, 2010
Students are now learning to write persuasive letters and essays. A good persuasive letter has: An introductory paragraph: States your opinion on an issue and what you believe about it. Involves the rader through a personal anecdote or simple, effective example. Or, opens with a surprising fact or question. Body paragraphs: Present support in a [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 25, 2010
Thursday and Friday students worked in class on a fictional narrative about a major accomplishment. Next week we will begin working on persuasive writing, one of the other genres we focus on in seventh grade. On Friday, I also booktalked Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, one of the books available from Scholastic Book Clubs. Uglies is [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 22, 2010
Today we talked about a number of strategies for writing a good fictional narrative. Some of our discussion included: Doing a brainstorm. Work out your ideas for a plot with conflict, suspense, rising action, a climax, and falling action. Also make notes about your characters and their personalities and your setting. Have a grabber in [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 20, 2010
Don’t forget that the Accelerated Reader deadline for this quarter is tomorrow afternoon. Students can take quizzes until library closing time at 3:30 P.M. tomorrow. Today we finished going over the list of homophones we began work on Friday, and also added which/witch. Our current list of homophones and near-homophones includes: there/they’re/their its/it’s accept/except allowed/aloud [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 19, 2010
Today in class, we talked about a number of different homophones that students are tending to confuse in their writing, including: there/they’re/their its/it’s accept/except allowed/aloud know/no knew/new our/are/hour to/too/two To help with this discussion, the class used both a bluetooth tablet I have on loan and our new wiimote interactive whiteboard to manipulate terms on [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 15, 2010
Today we visited the library for reading, AR quizzes, and book selection. We also reviewed the English Workshop homework from the last two nights. Please remember that your blog posting on New Year’s resolutions for a fictional character is due tomorrow morning. If you prefer to print what you write instead of posting it, don’t [...]
Continue Reading Add comment January 14, 2010
