Two Weeks in the Books

Another week is behind us. 7th grade is already flying by. I am getting to know the young men, and they are getting to know me. Writing and talking about our personal narratives will do that.

This past week we started working on our first personal narrative of the year. We looked at mentor text and even watched a couple of videos of Bill Cosby verbalizing his personal narratives.

We worked on using the BaDaBing sentence as a way to start the personal narrative.

We continued our work with prepositional phrases.

We read "Seventh Grade" by Gary Soto and discussed plot, characterization, and point of view.

We added several literary terms to the vocabulary section of our IRWIN.

And many of the young men have started reciting "Invictus" with me.

Next week, we start poetry. As an introduction to poetry, we will see a few classroom scenes from Dead Poet's Society. We will learn the aspects of TPCASTT and begin to analyze some excellent poems, including "Invictus."

We also have our 3 Week Assessment towards the end of the week. It will be a personal narrative. Hopefully, the work we've already done will help us on this. We will do writing conferences and multiple revisions, but the Assessment grade will be for the first draft of your paper.

In two weeks we begin reading A Separate Peace by John Knowles. You need to get yourself a copy now. Try Half Price Books or buy one on Amazon.com. I just checked, and Amazon has used copies for a penny. Even with the shipping and handling, it's just $4. But order soon! I might have a few books for loan. Come see me if you need one.

Have a great, restful weekend. If you need something fun to do, visit the Fall Festival at St. Michael's church, across from South Grand Prairie H.S. And remember, Meet the Teacher Night is Tuesday night. I really hope to meet all of you then.