May
7
ELA B30: May 07 Themes and essay planning…
- Students worked on filling in their own responses yesterday in determining how several themes were relevant to the play of Hamlet. We discussed those today and students shared several of their examples.
- On the board, I spent some time this morning brainstorming for an essay of my own. Since we haven’t had any essay work since January, I wanted to be sure students had examples that reminded them of the process they have to follow in doing their major essay project. With the example on the board, there were five possible paragraph topics that suited my topic. With each, there were explanations of the topic and attached to each were two examples each of direct reference cited from the literature. From there, I was able to choose which three paragraphs I felt would be best for my essay, I organized them from good, better, and best in proving my argument, and then created topic sentences for each.
I wrote a few topic sentences on the board for each of my paragraphs and asked students to analyze each to see if they were on topic of off topic. (Just because a sentence is close to the topic does not mean it’s the best sentence to prepare your reader for your topic.) - From there, students had time to work independently on their project. There will be several class periods to work where students can get a little guidance in writing their essay. You will have to write a formal literary essay for your departmental on the Hamlet play. This is absolutely great practice.
- And… as announced last week and yesterday, there is a Hamlet / Unit Final exam tomorrow. You’ll do fine if you’ve been following along (or keeping up) as we’ve studied this crazy story!
- Reminder – when citing reference from Shakespeare, you have to cite it by Act, scene and line(s), such as (V, ii, 34-39).