We have written our thesis statements for our final essay of the school year.  Tonight we are writing a rough draft of our introductory paragraph using the following format:

 

- 2 introductory sentences that are related to our thesis, but in a more general sense and they act as an introduction to our thesis

- 1 thesis statement (already written)

 

These three sentences will make up our introductory paragraph for our three paragraph essay.  This is our first draft.

We are brainstorming ideas for our end of year essay about the following elements of Where the Red Fern Grows:

- theme of overcoming obstacles and loss

- theme of childhood adventure

- theme of the power of prayer

- identifying key conflicts in the novel

Students will complete a bubble brainstorm exercise in their notebooks on their chosen topic so we can begin to write our rough drafts.

Sentences should be corrected to show no errors and sentences rewritten into compound (complex) sentences with grammar, punctuation, and spelling counting.

Students are correcting all the sentences and rewriting them in compound form being mindful of spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and basic grammar (all graded).  

We are working on two resource worksheets this week, one of fixing sentences and another on writing places and names properly (both attached).  Both are due on Wednesday.

After working on our Nature Poems, which are due tomorrow, we ran through a review of nouns, verb, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases (as adjective and adverb phrases).

 

Homework

Complete the noun review worksheet per the instructions given in class when diagramming the sentences on page 2 (underline nouns, underline verbs twice, use arrows to show descriptive words, and use parantheses to identify prepositional phrases).

We finished our last unit in both Wonders books by reading a selection of lyric and narrative poems.  We then started to work on brainstorming ideas for writing our Nature Poem, which is due Wednesday.  (Attached).

Students are working on completing their sentences corrections and writing compound sentences for this week's packet of sentences (attached).

 

Homework

Finish the packet by writing grammatically correct compound sentences.

We are writing our next paragraph and this time we are writing ourselves into the story as the narrator (1st or 3rd person).  Students will follow these guidelines for this story:

 

- 5 to 10 sentences

- Present tense

- No dialogue or quotation marks (direct dialogue only)

- You are the narrator (1st or 3rd person point of view)

- Must be fiction, not redux's of films or actual events

- Rough draft due Monday, February 26th

- Final draft (typed on a Google Doc) is due Tuesday, February 27th