Time to Strategize

We learned a lot about different reading strategies from your peers this past week with the great presentations that you all put together. Now, the question is, "How will you use those reading strategies?" Explain one or two specific reading strategies you learned about that you will try to use during the rest of the year to help improve your understanding or just make your studying easier.

The End Is Near!

It is finally the end of the year and it is always good to reflect on what you have accomplished throughout the year. I am always looking to improve my teaching too, so I would also appreciate your comments on what we did in class this year to help prepare you for the years to come. Please take some time to answer the following questions honestly.

1) What was your favorite part of Composition this year?
2) Which writing piece are you most proud of?
3) What was your least favorite part of Composition this year?
4) How has your writing improved throughout the year, specifically?
5) What is one thing you would (realistically) recommend I change for next year?

Sharing Time

Each time we do writer's workshop and then silent share in class you get the opportunity not only to share your work with others, getting positive feedback, but you also get to read other classmates' stories and respond to their writings. What are the things you enjoy the most about the writer's workshop/silent share days? Be specific.

A Little Friendly Advice

There is a reason that at the end of almost every book you read the author always has a page dedicated to thanking his or her editor or those that provided support in making that writing better (and ultimately successful). Your classmates have been your support throughout this gigantic research paper and who better can give you some last-minute advice for how to improve it? You have, no doubt, read many of your peers' chapters throughout this process, some pretty good, some needing a bit more work. Please take a second to think about how your classmates can improve their writing throughout the revisions and final changes you will make next week before turning in that final paper. Be specific, put some thought into it, and actually write something useful-- "spell better" is not going to cut it!

Character Counts!

Do any characters in your book grow or change over the course of the novel? If so, how?
Does any character come to learn something about himself/herself or view the world differently? If so, what does he/she learn?
Or is the character “static,” unchanging from beginning to end? Explain.

Who Knew?

As you have been spending so much time reading sources to use for your US History research papers, you have, no doubt, learned a lot about your topics whether you really wanted to or not. For today's blog entry, share a couple of the more interesting things you learned in your research with the rest of the class. As always, please make sure you use complete, detailed sentences and proper grammar/usage/mechanics (yes, this includes spelling)!

Waxing Poetic...

Since you have just written some excellent poems of your own, this week's blog is about poetry.

Please answer these questions in complete sentences:
1) Have you ever read any poetry for enjoyment (not as an assignment), or have you ever had to read a poem for an assignment, but actually found you enjoyed it? What was the poem or what was it about?

2) If you had to spend some time reading poetry, what style would you prefer to read, and why? For example, do you like the silly rhyming style, the more serious tear-jerker poems, the free verse (like our small moment poems), the long poems that are more like a story, or another style?

3) What did you think of the poem you came up with for your last assignment? Was it better/worse than you expected? Was it difficult to do?