October 28-November 14
We completed our reading of The Lady or the Tiger and decided to make it into a movie. We chose our own ending. We created a storyboard. We picked roles. We took photographs of ourselves for the scenes. We have been busy. We also spent time finishing our weird NJ stories for our iEARN project. In addition, we began some work for the projects sponsored by other schools.
October 7-24
We completed our reading of The Gift of the Magi. We also read Saki's The Open Window. Since the class has very strong emotions about the ending of these stories, we rewrote the ending of the story of our choice and shared these with the class. We then started to read The Lady or the Tiger. In addition, we viewed some photos of Morocco from one of our partner schools in the iEARN project.
September 29-October 6
We completed our work on the Paraphrasing Strategy. We will now use this knowledge in class to help explain what we read in our own words. After reviewing short story structure and active reading strategies, we read our first story, The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry. We also discussed possible project ideas for our iEARN project.
September 15-26
We completed our presentations, and what a treat that was! Everyone was so enthusiastic, and we were able to visualize the "one ring" and learn why being a third born can be dangerous. We then started our first strategy for the year, the Paraphrasing and Summarizing strategy. We learned that an effective paraphrase must be correct, be in our own words, and make sense. Then we learned the TM-D process of identifying topics, main ideas, and details and began practicing this in our exercises.
Welcome Back to your First Assignment!
I know you all worked very had this summer reading your two, (or more), novels. As we saw from the 32-Second Macbeth example and the Reduced Shakespeare Company's Macbeth, it is possible to take a large novel and turn it into a simple presentation. Your job is to take your summer reading novel and turn it into a manageable, and entertaining, presentation for the class. Use the sheet you were given in class as a reference for what information you need to include. Be as creative as you want with this. Write a poem, a song, a paragraph, a dialogue, make a video, create a storyboard, role play your story in your video games and show us the results. The possibilities are endless, but see me if you get stuck or overwhelmed.
