Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Goodbye!

Thank you all for such an amazing year! Stay safe and enjoy the summer!







Thursday, June 13, 2013

Annotation Post-Assessment

Today was another "wrap-up" day. You took the Annotation Post-Assessment. You had never seen the passage I gave you, and all you had to do was annotate it. Hopefully, you know what you need to do in order to annotate well and hopefully you show significant improvement from the beginning of the year when I had you annotate another passage. The goal is to carry this skill throughout your high school career and beyond. It will be an invaluable tool you'll need in order to do well academically.

Then, we wrapped up Night by taking your final Night Quiz and going over Elie's final pages of his memoir. Hopefully you learned something from the books we have read this year, and at least enjoyed them even a little bit. As Mr. Hannah and I told you in the beginning of the year, if all you get out of this class is that you become avid readers, then I'm glad.

Tomorrow, we'll continue to wrap things up with Ms. DeRousi and her final Morphology lesson and start going over some strategies you can use for taking the final exam next week.

DEETS
In-class:
--Annotation Post-Assessment
--Finish Night

HW:
--Start studying for the final!

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Post-Assessment

Today you took Ms. DeRousi's post-assessment. Again, this is not graded and will not affect your overall grade in any way. This is simply to see how far you've progressed over the course of the semester.

Then, you were given the rest of the period for DEAR time. Hopefully, most of you used it to finish Night. If you've already finished the book, you were able to have a longer period of time to do some reading.

Tomorrow, you'll be taking your final quiz for the semester on annotation. You'll be given a passage of writing you've never seen before and be asked to annotate it. Let's see how much you've learned! Then, we'll be wrapping up Night.

DEETS
In-class:
--Post-Assessment
--DEAR

HW:
--Finish reading Night

Monday, June 10, 2013

Research Paper Wrap Up

Today I showed you how to set up your Works Cited page. This is very simple to do especially since I provided you with that sample on Schoology under the Research Paper folder. In case you forgot, here's how you do it.

Author's Last Name, First Name. "Article Title." Website/Newspaper.

Just cite the three sources you used. Remember, some of you may only have to cite two sources because you used two quotes from the same article.

The Works Cited page is the last page of your research paper. It's its own page. Make sure to get the format exactly as I showed you in the sample. You will lose points if you have it formatted incorrectly.

As for your research papers due tomorrow, I cannot stress how important these are. Make sure you are ON TIME tomorrow. There will be absolutely no excuses. They need to be printed, as well as have your rough draft and peer edit sheet attached with it.

If you have ANY questions at all, today is the day to come after school and get it done. I will not be answering emails late into the night. You've had over a month to work on this. Now is not the time to be asking me how to format your paper or how to set up the analysis of a quote.

Get it done and get here early tomorrow!

DEETS
In-class:
--Works Cited page
--Conferences
--Morphology

HW:
--Research Papers due TOMORROW!

Thursday, June 6, 2013

Chapter 5 of Night

Today you had probably your hardest paragraph quiz to date. This quiz asked you to synthesize what you read in Night, with a movie you're probably all generally familiar with--The Hunger Games. I know this wasn't an easy task, but this is what you'll be looking forward to next year. In the 10th grade and beyond, you'll be asked to take multiple sources (that could seem on the surface very unrelated) but then find connections between them all. If you struggled with this quiz, that's okay. But hopefully, you at least are looking at your old quizzes and not making the same mistakes twice.

As for the review, please take another look on Schoology under the Night folder if you felt you didn't quite understand what we went over today in class. For tomorrow, please read pages 85-97.

And as always, please make sure you're taking this time to revise the rough drafts of your research paper and ask me any questions now while you still have them.

DEETS
In-class:
--Night Paragraph Quiz
--Chapter 5 Powerpoint

HW:
--Read pgs. 85-97
--Revise your rough drafts. Final copy due Monday!

Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Peer Review

Today we worked on your peer reviews. Hopefully you got some valuable feedback from your peers about what you can do to make your research paper better. Please be mindful of their corrections and take this seriously. Revision is not just about fixing grammatical mistakes. Sometimes, it requires rearranging things, or even deleting and adding more material. It can be difficult, but it's worth it in the end.

Get to work and come see me or Mr. Hannah before or after school for extra guided attention.

DEETS
In-class:
--Peer Review

HW:
--Revise your research papers
--Read pgs. 66-84 due Thursday

Monday, June 3, 2013

Chapter 4

Today I checked to make sure you had your rough drafts of your research paper done. For those of who you have formatting issues, as we said last week, you have a week to get those fixed. Do not come in on Monday with the final draft of your research paper with all those errors because you will automatically start off with an 80.

Also, for those of you who didn't do it at all, now's the time to get it done. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, we'll be peer reviewing so if you don't have your rough draft of your research paper done, you will not be able to participate and get feedback from your peers on how to make your paper better. Likewise, if you don't bring in your rough draft, you will be hard-pressed to have Mr. Hannah or I to help you as we'll be busy assisting the students who actually did their work. Bottom line: get this done.

The powerpoint we went over today in class based on Chapter 4 of Night is up on Schoology under the Night folder. If you have any questions on it, please feel free to email me or Mr. Hannah.

Also, I know the documentary we watched today may have been graphic, but it's important to see some of these first-hand account footage of the Holocaust in order for us to fully understand. Because we live in such a digital age, sometimes we never really understand something or feel something until we actually see it first-hand. I know some parts may have been difficult to watch, but it's important that we are aware of the truth of what actually happened during this time period.

DEETS
In-class:
--Rough Draft Check
--Chapter 4 Powerpoint
--Night and Fog Documentary
--Morphology

HW:
--Rough drafts completed for Peer Review
--Read pgs. 66-84 by Thursday