1/5/2017

Today is our first day of academic work. We are going to read Othello this term. The other English IV teachers are doing Macbeth, but you know me – I have to be different. 😉

In order to make sure we all have the same vocabulary when talking about this play, each group has five words to define with a drawing. We then presented the images to the class. If you need more “drill and kill” practice, here is my Quizlet that I made for these words. As you can see, some of them are very basic, and some you may need to study.

If you were absent today, here is the make up activity. I just took a few of the terms that will be tested and created a few visuals for you to fill in about the word.

I am going to put these up around the room so that they can help jog your memory while reading and during quizzes. 🙂

9/14/2016

Today was a fairly easy day: I gave a vocabulary activity with the six (6) vocabulary words that we focused on in Beowulf:

  • Loathsome
  • Writhing
  • Massive
  • Reparations
  • Purge
  • Solace

One one side of the assignment, I asked a question for each vocabulary word. On the back, I had a list of images and asked you to match the picture that “matches” the vocabulary word.

vocab

Tomorrow, if you are passing, you’ll get to go to the play preview. If not, you’ll be working on zeros. You *will* see these vocabulary words on the test next Tuesday, so please don’t treat this as a blow off assignment. This should not take you the entire class period to do, so hopefully those of you who are missing work can take care of your business afterwards!

8/30/16

Today, we talked about mead halls, Herot, the magical number 3 (there are three fights that Beowulf faces in this epic), and Biblical allusions.

If you were here, we read pages 39-44. Vocabulary words that we read about include: reparations, solace, and fate.

We talked about Grendel is EVIL – his lineage, his family has been cursed by God because of Cain’s actions.

The Wrath of Grendel notes

(you can also find these in the PDF copy with my notes and highlighted quotes)

  • Beowulf is GREAT, so he’s a GEAT – GG
  • The Danish king’s people are DYING, and that’s how I remember Hrothgars’s name – DD
  • Herot is an epic building – beautiful, strong, majestic – but useless because of Grendel’s attacks.
  • For twelve years, Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, was powerless against he monster. He wept – the people dying aren’t just his soldiers, they are his family and friends – people he drinks with at the mead hall at night

 

8/24/2016

Everything we did today can be found in BB under Beowulf >Literary Elements, so if you missed today or just need a refresher, you can find this online. We did three activities today: alliteration sentence, caesuras magnet card, and we created memes.

We started out by doing a word search – I put you in partners and gave you a picture from the book Animalia. If you had the letter A, you and your buddy wrote down as many A letters down inside the letter that you could.

As you can see from this examples, all of the drawings in this picture start with the letter A.

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 compound 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 The Kennings and Memes assignment. If you look at Animal Kennings powerpoint, you’ll see memes that other people did about animals. Note they focus on what the animal LOOKS like or DOES. The also don’t rename the name of the animal. For example, it’s not a TRASH RACCOON because it IS a raccoon!

 

trash panda

MAKE sure that you are using a COMPOUND NICKNAME. You have to replace “Look at that raccoon”with “Look at that TRASH PANDA“.

I will take the Memeing Kennings activity as a grade.

1/26/2012

Make sure you download the Beowulf text in LMS. It’s long (29 pages!), but print it to OneNote or Journal Writer. Today, we read The Wrath (Anger) of Grendel and took notes.

Then we talked about how the Christians believed in Free Will while the Pagans believed in Fate. So Cap’n gave us a list of quotes and we had to sort them into fate/free will categories.

Lastly, she gave us a cartoon that we had to narrate.

Make sure that you use at least three words from *her* Word Storm and that it narrates a story of some kind.