Monday, September 27, 2010

Weekly Preview 9/27-10/1

Here's the scoop for this week in room 101:

6th GOAL: You will be starting literature circle discussions on Wednesday. Your theme is moral dilemma, and the book titles your group can choose from include: Left For Dead, Al Capone Does My Shirts, Nothing But the Truth, The Secret School, The Power of Un, Hoot, Stargirl, City of Ember, There's a Girl in my Hammerlock, Nobody Else Has to Know, That was Then This is Now, Wish Me Luck, and Holes. You will be completing a "Questions, Comments, & Quotes" sheet as you read to prepare for your daily discussion. This sheet is worth 10 points per day.

7th GOAL: You will be starting literature circle discussions on Wednesday. Your theme is culture clash, and the book titles your group can choose from include: Three Cups of Tea, The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Define Normal, Under the Same Sky, Iqbal, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, American Born Chinese (required), Seedfolks (required), Code Talker, Ringside 1925, The Misfits, and La Linea. You will be completing a "Questions, Comments, & Quotes" sheet as you read to prepare for your daily discussion. This sheet is worth 10 points per day.

8th GOAL: You will be taking your Mandarin Chinese vocabulary quiz on Monday. Later this week, you'll be starting Literature Circles. Your theme is the Holocaust, and I will booktalk the following titles for you group to choose: Maus I, Maus II, The Book Thief, Yellow Star, The Wave, Escape from Warsaw, Night, Soldier X, Milkweed, The Other Half of Life, Night, The Boy Who Dared, Emil and Karl, Run Boy Run, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Darkness Over Denmark, and Hidden on the Mountain. You will be completing a "Questions, Comments, & Quotes" sheet as you read to prepare for your daily discussion. This sheet is worth 10 points per day.

7th Language Arts: Your "Grown-Up Rules" stories are due in final draft form on Friday. This means you've revised your handwritten rough drafts, you've typed the story, you've had at least 2 peer conferences and made changes from those conferences, and you've self-edited and fixed mistakes found in self-editing. This is a Maintenance Test week for spelling, so there are no new words. On Friday, we'll have a Maintenance Test over the words in Weeks 1-5. We'll have a big review day on Thursday for those who would rather review than use class time to work on their stories. The spelling assignment (due Wednesday) this week is p. 39 (1-20), p. 40 (1-20), and p. 41 (1-10).

1 comment:

  1. Literature Circles-My best advice for GOAL students is to go for quality questions comments and quotes. Even after three years I never got quite the right balance of quality and quantity every week. You want three-ish per section and they need to be something that you really thought about. I always wrote like 15 questions and 10 comments and 5 quotes but they were wimpy and we never really got through it all when discussing. The more you think about each book the more you'll get out of it. I challenge all of you to get three Perfect 10 Papers.

    Example of Quality: Is there any experience in my life that is simular to what this charracter is going through? How would you deal with not knowing if you will live or die at any moment? (for 8th grade holocaust unit)

    You want open-ended questions-comments where you're trying to make connections and thought-provoking quotes

    The more you discuss the better!

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