Cores 1-4:
- Honor the new Authenticity Award Recipients.
- Continue to refine The Discovery Blogging Rules.
- Is this post appropriate for our blogs?
Core 1:
- Discuss-On: Why do we make fun of things?
- Read Onion Articles and establish definition of Satire and its characteristics on your Genre Master List:
- Discussion Questions:
- What are these articles making fun of/criticizing? How are they doing it?
- Why are they targeting these particular aspects of society?
- What can you do with satire (such as these) that you cannot do with other genres of writing?
- Homework: Which social topic do you think deserves to be made fun of? How are you going to exaggerate it in order to change it?
Core 2:
- Discuss-On: What is the best way to honor our fallen soldiers? Share with one another until you establish the best solution for not making sacrifices to our country seem like statistics or things that should be forgotten?
- Why are big words good?
- Introduce The Word Within The Word.
Core 3:
- Check Completing the Sentence in Vocab book.
- Talk about Vocab quiz on Friday.
- Start Our Trip To Essay Land by Packing Our Bags:
- I have a severe obsession with the introductory paragraph. I explain this obsession through an essay I wrote on my own writing process. I expand this topic to talk about how everyone writes an essay differently, but my favorite way is to focus on the first topic and make it perfect. I usually start brainstorming the first sentence and make sure it is a powerful as I need it to be, but a more in depth look at this idea of a Start-Me-Up first sentence can be found here.
- In the metaphor, the first sentence represents the bag that you pack everything in. You need to pick the right sized bag or else you either won’t have enough clothes (ideas and details) to fill up the bag or you will have too many.
- The three major ways that I like to start an essay (as shown in the handout) are as follows:
- The Truest/Most Powerful/Most Interesting/Most Important/Most Shocking thing you know about your subject.
- A Quotation.
- A Question
- Many of my students come up with other ways of starting an essay. These other ways can be more natural to them, but I try to encourage them to branch out and try new ways of starting off their best essay so far. Here are some examples of student ideas for a Start-Me-Up sentence.
- One word. Then a powerful definition of that word.
- A great image or extended example which is later explained in the introductory paragraph.
- A dictionary definition (not my personal favorite).
Core 4:
- Use the library computers to work on Weekly Authentics, commenting, and building comments.
