Daily Archives: January 27, 2015

1/27/2015 – B

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We started out today with the most appropriate picture: Death and the Devil Surprising Two Maidens.

Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women

Then, we read Grandma Betty’s Obituary from the Blog of Death. What an amazing woman! Seriously, this is the legacy that I’d like to leave when I die! I love Grandma Betty!

Then, we looked at the Blog of Death in a little more detail. I skimmed through and showed you a few people that were of interest to me, and I showed you how to use the categories, even though I wish there was a place to actually see all of the categories!

The point of that was that we are searching for really good sentences that we can use as models or mentors when we start writing our major grade next week.

Mentor Sentences

You have to find FIVE great opening lines. That is the opening line(s) of an obituary, not the paragraph. You have to find five great endings for an obit, and you’ll need to find five good general lines from anywhere in an obituary.

DO NOT JUST CHOOSE THE FIRST FIVE OBITS THAT YOU FIND AND CHOOSE THREE LINES FROM EACH. That is not the point of this, and it won’t help you write your paper next week. Seriously. This is NOT busy work, so if you get done in five minutes, that’s a sign to me that you just chose random sentences without thought.

If you want extra credit, if you find a really interesting Obit, put the person’s name in the last column so I can share it with other students. 🙂

I also have a list of the people that I find fascinating if you are getting stuck stuck looking people. As of right now, it’s not in Blackboard, so let me know if you need it. 🙂

1/27/2015 – A

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Everything we did today can be found in BB under Beowulf >Literary Elements. We did three assignments today: alliteration sentence, caesuras magnet card, and kennings.

We started out by doing a word search – Riley gave us a picture from the book Animalia and a sheet with  a letter on it. If you have the letter A, write as many A letters down inside the letter that you can.

So, you can see from this picture that there are a whole bunch of A’s in here. Write them down inside your letter.

So, if you were absent and need a letter, choose one of the following:

Or you can choose this one:

To go get the letter, go to BB>Beowulf>Literary Terms> Drop Box: Alliterative sentence to find the PDF file of either C or P. Print it out and start writing down words!

When you are done with that, you will then a ten word alliterative sentence. If you have C, you are going to write ONE sentence that MAKES SENSE that has AT LEAST TEN (school appropriate) C WORDS. If you have P, you are going to write ONE sentence that MAKES SENSE that has AT LEAST TEN (school appropriate) P WORDS. Write this sentence around your letter.

Think of it this way: start out with a base sentence, like:

Ellen Eves entered the east entrance.

That’s only five E words, so I need to add more.

Think of and adjective for Ellen, like this:

Energetic Ellen Eves entered the east entrance.

Look at your VERB. Think of an adverb that can describe it.

Energetic Ellen Eves eagerly entered the east entrance.

Still short? Try adding adjectives such as colors and numbers.

Energetic Ellen Eves eagerly entered the east entrance eight times.

Energetic Ellen Eves, when she was only eighteen, eagerly entered the east entrance eight times.

Nine Words! This is  where I suggest going to the dictionary to find an E word that you can incorporate and using PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES.

Energetic Ellen Eves, when she was only eighteen, eagerly entered the east entrance eight times with an entourage after the examination.

Then, we listened to The Breaks and watched Riley dance crazily around the room. You kinda missed the show here, but she was demonstrating caesuras.

What you need to do is on an index card, write caesuras on the front, and then write the following four words around it in the four corners: pause, suspense, comma, break.

On the back of the card, write a definition for caesuras using those four words. Ask a crew member for help if you need it. :)

Then, we worked on kennings. A kenning is pretty much just a fancy nickname. The Anglo-Saxons used them, so to understand the bards, we need a little nickname practice. Go to the Beowulf vocabulary folder in BB and find kennings. You can either give those five objects a kennings nickname for 10 points, or create a Guess Who game for 20 points. It’s your choice!