Monthly Archives: November 2014

11/7/14

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If you did not get finished with your Pre-Writing from yesterday, spend about 15 minutes finishing that. IF YOU SPEND ANY LONGER, YOU WON’T GET THE POEMS DONE.

There will need to be two poems. I don’t care if you and your buddy write one each individually, or if you both write them together.

poems

Poem 1

  • Persuasive
  • 24 lines
  • 6 stanzas
  • Rhyming couplets
  • AABB Rhyme Scheme

Poem 2

  • Rejection of Poem 1
  • 24 lines
  • 6 stanzas
  • Rhyming couplets
  • AABB Rhyme Scheme

Make sure that when you turn your poem in, you let me know who your partner is so he/she can get credit as well.

We are using The Passionate Shepherd and The Nymph’s Reply as a model, so if you need to see what the poem should look like, go look at the poems we read yesterday.

11/6/14

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Y’all, I am SO not feeling great today, but I love that you let me teach, so I am giving it my all!

First, we talked about the word pastoral and the related words naive, country, and provincial.

pastoral

provincial

We then watched the opening scene from Beauty and the Beast and compared/contrasted it with Beauty and the Beat, by Todrick Hall.

B&B

We then read and annotate the Passionate Shepherd and The Nymph’s Reply.

Here is poem 1.

Passionate Shepherd

We had a few students who I woo’d with promises of love and nature.

PICTURES GO HERE

Walter Raleigh read that poem and thought it was ridiculous. Kinda like I thought when I first heard Bruno Mars’ “Grenade.” So he wrote a response:

nymph

Then, we partnered up with a buddy to do the Persuasion Partner Pre-Writing (Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4).

Here is my example that I did:

step 2

Here are my ideas for what a mother might say to a teacher to try and convince her/him to pass her failing child:

step 3

Here are my ideas as to how the teacher might respond to the parent:

step 4

Try to get as many ideas as possible so that writing the poem tomorrow will be easy!

11/5/2014

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For those of you who are at the Texas Rain-assance Festival today, have fun! The assignment today was exempted for you. 🙂 If you want want to do it for extra credit, you can.

For everyone else, we worked on the collage.

Carefully select images which represent specific aspects of carpe diem. You can use pictures from internet, magazines, or even draw your own! You can also use symbols, colors, and patterns to depict the theme. Your images and illustrations need to show that you understand the themes

Yes, your poster needs to be attractive – presentation counts!

This is what I will be grading:

collage

11/4/2014

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If you are registered voter, make sure you get out and vote!

Today, we just worked on our Obituary in class. It was pretty much a shut up and work day.

It will be due tomorrow, but we won’t have any time to work on it in class tomorrow, since we’ll be doing the collage during class.

Remember – if you get stuck, use the examples in the Blog of Death and the student examples in BB. You don’t have to live a crazy life in order to carpe diem – just think about the legacy that you want to leave.

11/3/14

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Some of you get an easy start this morning because you scrambled Friday to get your Future Timeline done. Everyone else started with this this morning!

There is a link in BB that will take you here:

FT1

So, you’ll start out here. All you need to do here is add your name and the title Future Timeline. and then hit start.

FT2

Here, you’ll add your first item. Click on the timeline to see this screen. All you need focus on are the label and the picture. Don’t worry about adding the short or the long description – this is just a pre-writing activity for ideas. You’ll do the writing about it during the Obituary, which we are starting today!

FT3

When you are done, it should look something like this, except yours will be real items. :)

FT4

If you have to quit BEFORE you are done, you’ll hit SAVE at the top and save it as a RWT file. This is a rough draft. You can’t turn this in.FT5

When you are done, you’ll hit finish and see this screen. Then, you’ll hit SAVE FINAL.

FT6

Save this as a PDF and turn this bad boy in.

The Big Grade: our first major writing grade!

Today, we started out by talking about obituaries in general. They are the written notices of death that usually include a brief biography of the person. Then we read the poem The Dash by Linda Ellis and talked about that poem supports this quote from the Blog of Death:

Some people view obituaries as morbid stories, but in truth only one line of an obit deals with death. The rest of the story focuses on the amazing lives people lead.

We are going to write our OWN obituary in class. You need to focus on CARPE DIEM – how did you make your life extraordinary? You will need to be at least 75 years old (or older) – it’s hard to carpe diem a life when it’s short. Think about the Bucket List pre-writing and the Bucket List that we did this week – use those to find your focus. Is it family? Is it being successful? Is it helping other people? Use that focus to help you figure out details and events to your life.

Under Carpe Diem: Obituary, you can find instructions and examples, one of which being my own. Yes, I do every assignment that I ask you to do. The reason that I do this is so that I can share things that helped me when I did the assignment. The thing that helped ME the most when I wrote my obit was the Blog of Death. Seriously. I used it not for ideas, but for sentence structures and modeling. Use your Sentence Models that we did on Friday for help and inspiration!

For example, here is the first sentence of Demetius Newton’s obituary:

Rep. Demetrius C. Newton dedicated his life to improving the human condition, first as a civil rights attorney and later as a politician and public servant.

It’s a great sentence, but obviously, I’m not a civil rights attorney, politician, or a public servant. But it’s a great sentence.

So what I would do is this: I’d take out the specific information and leave blanks.

_____ dedicated her life to improving ____________, first as a ________ and later as a __________.

Now that it’s not specific, I can add in my own information.

Vanessa Riley dedicated her life to educating other, first as a teacher and later as the director of the at-risk high school that she founded.

If you look in BB, you can see the rubric that will be used to grade the obituary. You need to have a minimum of 500 words.