Monday, December 15th, 2014

This week we're working on an paragraph that either supports or refutes the theme "love and beauty can be found, even in tragedy" for the Hans Christian Anderson story, "The Little Match Girl".
Here are some documents to aid in writing the paragraph: 1 2 

Monday, November 24th, 2014

The final draft of the narrative is due tomorrow by the end of class.  We will be in the computer lab typing it.  It must be handed in with a rough draft and all of the following.

Friday, November 14th, 2014

Today we'll be working on effective hooks and intros for our narratives.  Next week we'll begin drafting the narrative.  Here is the rubric.

Wednesday, November 12th, 2014

Today we worked on the themes for our narratives and created a theme billboard which is to be completed by tomorrow (11/13/2014).  Requirements and directions for the billboard are here.  

Thursday, November 6th, 2014

Today we continued to work on our narratives.  We specifically worked on developing a "round" main character.  Tomorrow will discuss (in groups) the decisions the characters would make in these scenarios.

Today our wonderful librarian Ms. Arrance gave a lesson on navigating the library's catalogs and physically locating the books.  If you would like to see the lesson have you child show you schoology.

Today we finished the working on the "Seventh Grade" summaries.  The summaries, peer check-list, summary plan and rubric were all to be stapled together and handed in.  This draft will be revised and a final draft will be completed after Fall break.

Monday, October 6th, 2014

Happy Monday, all!

Today for a warm-up we completed an exercise that gave us specific partners for pair work while also reviewing the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions, etc.).

We then got a new spelling and vocabulary sheet and worked on the exercises.  The exercises on this sheet are due on Friday and include using each word in a sentence.  Because of the shortened schedule next week the spelling and vocabulary test will be next Tuesday (the 14th).  Thanks!

Thursday, September 25th, 2014

For a warm-up today students were allowed a free-write.  This permits a journal entry, a story, stream of consciousnesses, or pretty much whatever they want to write, within reason.

We then continued Gary Soto's story "7th Grade" and worked on response notes, concentrating on being an active reader.  

Wednesday, September 24th, 2014

Our warm-up today was finishing spelling and vocabulary exercises.

We then watched Brain Pop's video on mood and tone.  The username for Brain Pop is summitmid and the password is pop1.

We then read the first portion of Gary Soto's story "7th Grade".  We practiced taking response notes in the margins and answered a few questions on the text.

Today in class we watched an video about an amazing and lesser known story that happened in Manhattan on 9/11/2001.

We then looked at, discussed and identified different types of literary conflict.  Here is the slide presentation and the work sheet.

Today in class we warmed up by writing about an episode in our life that contained all the elements of a story (setting, plot, character(s), conflict and theme).  Then we shared the stories with our groups.

We then watched a flocabulary video on the story elements, defined the elements and found examples of all the elements in the story "Hansel and Gretel".