After yesterday's introduction to Close Reading strategies, students got a chance to come practice the skills themselves. Here are some great pictures of us practicing on "The Rose that Grew from the Concrete" by Tupac Shakur. There is also a picture of students practicing the strategies on "Identity" by Julio Noboa Polanco.
I apologize for the lack of posts in the past two weeks. It has been a doozie. Volleyball is on a role and Drama Club is in full swing. I wanted to let you all know that our first piece of coursework will be due on Friday. Students need to bring two typed copies of their drafts so that we can pull them out and continue working on them throughout next quarter. We have also started to work on our second piece of coursework. When completed, this will be one of two or three options for Assignment Three: Response to a Text. It is, in my opinion, one of the more difficult pieces for students to master as it requires comment on argument and on language. This requires a lot of work from students. So keep encouraging and supporting! We both know our students are capable of incredible things if they keep at it. Have a happy Friday Eve!
Somehow the weeks have time-warped and we're now into September! Before we all head out to happy and safe Labor Day weekend, I want to inform you all of the great happenings in our classroom. The Data Board is finally set up for the world to see, and man, it is showing some excellent things for our students. A bit of a back story. Those students in FLE and English II are preparing to take the Cambridge IGCSE FLE Exam in May (that is the goal). Our first objective is to read for a selected purpose. This is the essence of Question Three on the exam. Essential, students will have to read a passage, find evidence specific to the question, and then write a straight-forward-no-nonsense summary. We have been focusing all of our energy on finding the evidence and then putting similar points together and paraphrasing (using our own words). Last week, students were asked to read an article about the Manassas High School football team and the new Netflix documentary Undefeated about the team. As an aside, I highly recommend the movie despite some of the stronger language. Manassas is an inner-city Memphis school that is underfunded and filled with underprivileged students. Their football team was in shambles. But, thanks to the help of Coach Courtney, over the past few years, the team has become a state champion winning team. After reading the article, students were asked what challenges the football players and the filmmakers had to overcome on their journeys to making Undefeated. They sifted back through the text and found the evidence and then worked together to collapse and paraphrase. I'm happy to report the following: As you can see from the Data board, a good chunk of students are either exceeding the goal or meeting the goal of 75%. On the exam, we want students to aim for 11 out of 15 dot points. That equals 73% of the points. So, many of our students are either above that, at that, or within a dot point or two of accomplishing that. Looking at the data, the students falling below that number are typically the ones who were not here last year. A big shout out to the 8th grade team for readying our students!
While this is a great way to end this post, I would like to also include this wonderful piece of information. It certainly made my week. |
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