1. Good morning, Grade tens! I hope you settle in quickly and get right to planning out your essay. You have the essay outline sheet given to you yesterday or you can ask Mrs. Enns for a copy of her essay outline sheet to make copies if you like.
   Remember that John got the million dollar question right yesterday – You only get write out your essay on the computer on Monday and Tuesday if you come with a fully detailed essay outline on Monday morning. That means use your time well. Focus!
2. Also, if you think you’re all set and you’re just hanging, relaxing, chillin… you have two blog entries assigned to you now, with another coming shortly. Remember we said to follow the outline of your Course Overview – it reminds you that there is a blog entry due at the end of each sub-unit. We have nearly finished the Rights and Responsibilities sub-unit, which will mean that you’ll be asked to reflect on your own thoughts regarding the topic and complete an entry with all requirements.

Have a great class and I hope to see you all out to cheer this weekend for the Kenaston Kodiak girls… 🙂

1. The temperature outside today was minus forty eight! There was obviously no regular classes today.. lol

1. Our unit for this course focuses on Equalities – equality of opportunity, of rights, of protection and many others. We, ourselves, face very little hardship mostly because our protected rights are honoured in our country. Many other countries do not have such protection for the citizens of their countries. The people living there live in conditions much different than our own. Are you aware that cultural genocide is happening still today? Even after the world has been shocked and ashamed for decades after the genocide of the Jews in World War II, it is happening during our lifetime but yet we are mostly unaware or unphased by it. Do we have a responsibility to be educated about the plight of others? What do you think?
2. Your assignment is to consider a current events issue that relates to the unit – somewhere people’s rights are not being protected or something is happening that seems unjust and you think it should be our responsibility to at least be informed, at the very least.
   
   You will research your topic to find relevant information during this first class. In particular, today though, you have to keep a record of each website you visit in looking for that information. Open a word document and put your topic as the title. Then, for each website you visit, copy and paste the URL link to your document and write a short description of the information from that page (ie: good, bad, useful pictures, good explanation of the conflict, etc). You may print off some pages of information to the computer lab, with Mr. Heath’s permission first. You will write a formal expository essay on Thursday and Friday. Use your time wisely to choose a topic and find relevant information about it. Consider following this time guideline:

   Monday: Brainstorm for topic; begin searching for information and resources; copy / paste each website and write short description

   Tuesday: Continue research; organize information to ensure you have enough support and know the direction your essay will take

   Wednesday: work in classroom to organize information into essay outline, rough draft

   Thursday: In class essay writing, rough draft (all work handed in at end of class)

   Friday: In class essay writing, complete rough (first) draft (all work handed in at end of class)

3. Some ideas for your essay could include:
   1. The treatment of women and children in third world countries
   2. Continued child labour factories
   3. Communist countries that dictate an individual’s occupation, family size etc
   4. Murder / attacks on missionaries in third world countries
   5. Child poverty in Canada
   6. Child soldiers in Africa
   7. Living conditions on Canadian reservations
   8. Death of children from preventable causes
   9. Fair trade issues
   10. Arms trade
   11. Third world debt

Here is a link to a website that has more options and information for each. Again, be sure to begin documenting the websites you visit. I’ll look for this word document tomorrow.

Use your time wisely, please. And reminder…. no YouTube videos.

1. The students did a wonderful job of coming in this morning and setting a purpose for reading, as we have been discussing this week. They got their heads in the “game” and were completely focused. I was very pleased.
2. Once they were finished, they had about ten minutes left of class so we went to the drafting lab and students were given time to ensure they had completed the second blog assignment, the two paragraph reflection of the first sub-unit in this class, Racial Inequality. The instructions are posted on the blog entry for Feb 26.

1. After having reviewed some of the specific steps in more proficient reading, the students did a dry run of the reading test. This was a practice test that included a different reading source and questions than their actual test will include. The benefit, though, is that they had a chance to become more comfortable with the format of the exam and test themselves as to their comfort level with what tasks were asked of them.
   Many of them were stumped on the visualization portion of the test, so that’s something we’ll review a bit before they do the actual exam on Friday. (They’ve chosen that date as being the best day for the test.)

1. After yesterday’s review of the habits of effective listeners and understanding that these directly apply to reading as well, we looked more closely at specific stages of reading (before, during, after) and the steps a careful reader should go through (whether naturally or by focused choice) in order to gain greater comprehension and therefore retain more information in the process.
2. The activity today, I was pleased to see, was a little energized with a few students doing a great job of demonstrating Biased Listening or Impatient Listening, though I don’t think they intended on role playing for our educational benefit. It fits with our topic, though, because I think they all understand and would be able to recognize similar negative habits in reading behaviours.

1. At the beginning of our course together, we had discussed the reality that for every “genre” of literature there is a correlating “purpose” for writing, on the part of the author. For example, if the genre is a persuasive essay, the author’s purpose is to pursuade. If the literature is a narrative essay (short story), then the author’s purpose is likely to entertain.In the same way that the style of literature dictates the author’s purpose, the same style of literature should dictate your purpose for reading. This may seem a new idea for some, a purpose for reading other than because you are required to or for enjoyment. The reality is, in order to comprehend and retain more from reading a piece of literature, you have to ‘get in the game’, so to speak. (Michael keeps correcting me… saying “We aint talkin’ about practice…”) To make this point clear, that an author’s purpose for writing something dictates or directs our purpose for reading, we went through a handout that attempted to make this pretty clear.

   So why are we talking about Listening Skills? Because the students are going to be participating in a province-wide Reading Assessment. You ask how one has to do with the other, but they’re perfectly linked. To help students recognize the traits of a “type or genr” of literature, we did some listening activities with students having to provide the evidence they could find of that genre.

   I did the same activity with the ELA 20 class in the first semester, and with another group of students the year before. Here’s a link to the same write up but with some of the videos attached that the students seemed so intrigued by. 

What purpose for listening would this type of video require?