October
13
ELA 20 Oct 13/16 “The Rink” story text
a3-b-the-rink Short Story pdf
October
12
ELA 20 Oct 12/16 AR Task – Reviewing/Improving Reflective Essay Assignment
You’ve got a class set aside to make improvements and learn from errors you made in your Reflective Essay writing. Use the Curriculum Guide Objectives/Indicators below and submit to me some method of personal self-assessment or self-reflection that meets some of those indicators provided.
It can be submitted in the form of:
- an audio reflection
- a written reflection
- a chart of sorts
The Assessment level of your AR work, however you submit it, will be dependent on how thoughtful, detailed, and purposeful your reflection is.
September
20
ELA 20 Sept 20/16 Student-developed reflection questions for post-inquiry project
You’re working through a Guided Inquiry Project to explore and develop a personal conclusion or judgement related to the role of modern fairy tales in today’s childhood development. When you’ve finished the steps and have made your ultimate decision on this topic, you’ll be reflecting on the process of inquiry and submitting an audio reflection recording.
To help you with some self-reflection discussion points, you as a class will create a li
st of possible questions to consider. They’ll be added below when we get to the end of the inquiry process.
Possible self-reflection questions for this section:
- What is different for you between the questions you respond to alone, on your own and the questions you discuss with others? Do you mostly come out of a group discussion having heard ideas you’ve already thought of or do you most often hear new ideas in group discussions?
- How much thought did you put into this section’s questions? How much did this section’s topic affect how developed your responses are? (Ex: If you enjoyed the topic, did you develop more in your responses?)
- This section is designed differently than the other sections you usually complete. Can you pinpoint what was different about it? If so, explain whether you like the regular sections you work on or this type of section more.
- How much discussion was there in your group discussion(s)? What were you thinking during it? What kinds of thoughts were you aware of while the discussion was happening? Did you initially rush through the discussion or did you have a thoughtful talk on the subjects?
- How much do you typically contribute to group discussions? Which would you rather – have a discussion on a topic or debate about it? Why?
- Is it your preference to work alone or in a small group? What’s the difference for you, or are there times you want to work with others and times you don’t?
- Which task within this section did you find the most challenging and why? Which task within this section did you enjoy the most, if any?
September
9
ELA 20 Back to Wolf Willow – pdf text
September
7
ELA Sept 7/16 Testing Your Skills Identifying Poetic Devices
We review poetic devices found in poems in ELA and often-times the poems hold little interest for you outside of the context of the course topic. In this sample, these phrases are taken from popular songs you may be aware of.
The challenge is to a) see if you can identify the figurative device used, b) see if you can identify the song or artist as well, but also c) recognize that poetry and music are much the same and the same plays on word sounds and meanings are used by artists every day!
Here’s the audio of the Figurative Devices Test. You can use the paper copy to watch for which device is included in each. Of the 40 examples given, see if you can get an accuracy score of over 35 correct!
The audio is 12 minutes long.
Choose which handout you want to use: Level 1 (gives hints) or Level 2 (has no hints)
September
6
ELA 20 Sept 6 A1 Reflecting on Childhood – CC Task Options
Compose and Create (CC): You have two options for the Compose and Create portion of this section.
1. Create a poem using an online magnetic poetry website:
Go to an online magnetic poetry website and use the magnetic words to arrange a 10 line (minimum) poem about your youth. Once completed, capture an image of the poem (screen shot or snipping tool from Start Menu) and save it as an image file. You can post it to your blog, if you remember how, with an explanation of its meaning.
2. Create a Wordle that includes at least 40 words of your childhood memories or experiences:
Find an online Word Cloud Genertor and make sure to test the site to ensure it works before entering your words. Enter in your 40 words. To have some words appear larger and infer they are more significant, make sure to repeat those words more often. Again, once finished take a snapshot or use the snipping tool to capture an image of your word cloud. You can share this in an email. Your wordle needs to include your name.
Note: You can type your words out into a word file and paste them over to the app. Sometimes students have typed things out and then had to start over.
3. Create a Storify collection of posts from social media (Twitter, Instagram and/or Facebook).
You can use the website or app Storify to collect meaningful posts that fit with this topic of reflecting on childhood. In Storify, you search hashtag phrases and collect (drag and drop) posts into a feed that is then published as an embeddable post. See the sample below.
April
15
Ap 15/16 Handout Resources for Writing Analytical Lit. Essay – both 10s & 20s
There are a lot of stages of writing a formal type of essay like this and not everyone is going to need help on the same elements. Rather than handout a whole wack of handouts to you, I’m making them all available to you digitally; you can use the ones if/when you need help with that part of the writing process.
To help you understand which ones will be useful to you, I’m providing an image of the handouts. Sometimes, you know what the handout you want looks like, but aren’t sure which to open in the Folder shared with you through OneDrive. The file titles won’t always be so clear to tell.
On your iPads, I realized you can open the ones in Word doc format in Safari and click on the Comments. It will then open on the right-hand side and you’ll be able to click each comment and see its correlating phrase highlighted on the page to understand what explanation is given for each.
You can open the handout from OneDrive by clicking on the hyperlink below each image.
January
14
ELA 20 Partner – Group Metaphor Poem Writing
Click here to go to the post where other students have shared the group poems they wrote. Add your own Metaphor poem there as a “comment” to the post. 
January
4
ELA 20 The Emperor’s Club – movie watching
Welcome back from the break, 11s! I hope you had a great time with your family and friends the last two weeks!
In our ELA 20, we’ve been recently studying literature that focused on “The Influence of Others on Children”; the short stories “The Rink”, “Penny in the Dust”, “The Broken Globe” and the essay “Remember Mum When I Mocked You” all followed this theme of literature. The following movie will continue with that.
Before Watching:
As a class, see if you can come up with the common qualities each of these literature pieces have. What messages, characteristics, character types, relationships etc do they all have in common? Make as comprehensive a list as you can – you can write it out on the whiteboard in the classroom.
During Watching:
Once you’ve developed this Similarities List, you can start watching the video. As you watch, though, you each have to individually on a sheet of paper or your tablets keep adding to your own list of qualities from the movie that are Similar to your other list and qualities that are Different. For this you’d want to use a T-Chart.
Similar to other Texts Different from other Texts
The movie will take several classes, so keep track of the time when you left off.
November
4
ELA 20: Listening to your Group Discussion Recording
You’re going to love this! Remember when you recorded a group discussion and talked about the lessons you recognize in Fairytales? You’re going to listen to part of those group discussions and pay attention to:
- how much you contributed to the discussion
- count the number of times you cut someone off
- count the number of times you, yourself, were cut off
- listen for examples of ways you transitioned the topic to a new part of the discussion
- how you contributed to the talk – were your points on topic, were they repetitive of other comments, etc
- evaluate whether the discussion went well or if you have suggestions for how it could be improved
- listen to identify whether people took on certain roles in the discussion (did someone lead, someone become the reporter, etc)
You have an Assess and Reflect (AR) task from your A2 section that includes reflective questions to fill out after listening to at least 10 minutes of your discussion. Fill out these questions using as many details and specific comments about your participation as you’re able. This counts towards your AR mark of your course mark.