What's happening in Kenaston School…

Activity for students: The following sentences are about the same topic, transitions, but they do not flow well at all. Rewrite the same paragraph but make it your own and create a smooth flow by including transitions to guide the reader through the ideas. Post your paragraph both as a comment to this one and on your own blog. If you can, highlight in yellow the parts that are transitions.

Writing can seem choppy. The sentences don’t seem to fit together. Readers are not engaged by that type of writing. Sentences can be in the same paragraph if they share a topic. Paragraphs should be about more than a shared topic. People use transitions when they speak. It comes naturally. People who read a lot use transitions naturally. Other people struggle with them. It is a skill that has to be practiced. It can be developed. The benefits are huge.

After having written the three body paragraphs, it is time to write the Introductory paragraph. Several students were missing today, so we recorded this instruction as well. We wrote an intro for our Chrysalids (influences on David) paragraph. Your paragraph will be similar but should not copy any parts of this one.

The students took turns with each writing one of the sentences for our two previous body paragraphs. In this video, seven volunteers collectively write the third of our body paragraphs, with three others helping to edit them after the fact. The importance of this activity was that students held up their sign to indicate what the purpose was for each sentence as we wrote them. It should hopefully help everyone understand what a sentence number two should accomplish or how to approach a sentence number six. After trying this activity and having students write the three paragraphs themselves, they said they “got it” and it finally clicked for a lot of them. When I asked them to go back to their rating scale that they’ve kept to indicate their “comfort level” as we have approached these different steps in writing a Formal Literary Essay, where several originally rated themselves as feeling a level 6 or 7 (slightly comfortable), many of them just adjusted their scale to indicate their comfort with these types of paragraphs is at a 9 or 10, as confident as can be. Awesome!!

Here is the Essay – body paragraphs – written collectively by students.

PS: Tre was missing this day, so they included a little warm “well wishing” to him at the end. 

We are about to start your first attempt at writing a Formal Literary Essay! This is a big deal! If you learn it correctly the first time doing it, the process will be much more easy for all the other times you’ll repeat it in Grades 11 and 12.

So we don’t look at too much at once, I have started your essay writing instruction in pieces – we’ve looked at:

• what a five paragraph essay should look like in general
• what the three body paragraphs should be about and how to organize them (first, second and third)
• ways that a Literary essay is different from what you’ve tried before. (It discusses opinions about the writing or purpose etc, instead of discussing events of plot.)
• the structure of writing a seven-sentence body paragraph and why that structure is important. (Without it, students so often fall into the trap of writing plot summary, instead of giving background, context to the reference, integrating the reference, etc)
• Most recently, we have looked at examples of essays and body paragraphs and students spent time identifying the positives of each and some negatives. This video is about 30 minutes long and will be important to understand before our next class.

You can consider writing a few things down, like what the errors are in body paragraph writing so you can avoid those same errors.

The students in Driver Training missed the majority of the ELA class when we were just about to start “The Raven”. Because this is going to happen several more times and we don’t want them to miss all that instruction, I’ll record the classes during the days they’re missing. Hopefully, they can be of use to them!

Students will be writing their ELA A10 final exam next week and were given a handout that lists all the “skills” covered in the course that they are expected to have Mastered at this point. Their final exam will measure how well they have learned and can demonstrate those skills.

Understanding that some students are still struggling with a few of these skills, I have recorded some instruction videos to embed here so they can access the videos from home. These should be a helpful review in particular areas, if they need it.

The videos cover:

• Elements of Literature (pt 1) *pt 2 failed to record, so that’s still coming
• Figurative Language explanations and examples
• Practice finding figurative language in poems
• Integrating references into your own sentence (for body paragraphs)

Hope they’re of some use to you.

1. Our test was scheduled for yesterday, but with the snow day it was pushed back to today. That hopefully means they had (or used!) more time to study!
2. Tomorrow we’ll continue on with our next unit, Anticipation. There are some really great literature pieces in this Unit that I’m excited to share with them!
3. Don’t forget, either, that those students who were missing Monday for CWEX have another blog entry to complete. The topic for the two paragraphs is about the novel we’ve just read. Do your posts as they are assigned and things are much easier at the end of the course!

1. The Grade tens wrote their unit exam today. They were given recipee cards to write a cheat sheet on for the exam. Some of them were able to cram a lot of information onto them. (Taron was here for the exam but realized he wasn’t here to get the card and didn’t know about it, so we compromised and he was allowed to check his binder for a total of three minutes – the rest of the group agreed it was a fair balance.)
2. Tomorrow we’ll continue on with our Challenges Unit and finish the story of the “Man Who Had no Eyes”. It’s ending will surprise them.

I’m looking forward to seeing how they manage with their questions. If they’re stumped, though, they can do like others in the past have done – be creative!

1. With the weather so cold, only two Grade eleven students showed for school this morning. These same two are also students who do not participate in the Career and Work Exploration Program, so they were here for class yesterday while others were not. This means they’ve already done any “catch-up” work or assignments. They used their time to work on their classroom decorating for the judging that will likely happen tomorrow.