May 10

May 10/16 Inquiry Project Examples for Gr 9 ELA

Hi 9s! We started talking last Friday about the next big project we will tackle – completing an Inquiry Project in ELA. You decided to use the Unit on Survival and Conquering things, so your choice of topic for your inquiry will have to fit inside that theme in some way. It was difficult to start thinking of ideas for your project, though we spent some time trying to drum up ideas.

To get an idea of the different ways you can approach your inquiry question, I want you to look at some of the topics chosen by a group of students online.

Their teacher, Mr. Schoenbart, has gathered their inquiry ideas, blog links, and names together into this document here. Spend some time today looking at the inquiry questions and what sort of work went into each project.

  1. Track your search. Keep a record of the inquiry topic you looked into as well as the student blog address you looked through.
  2. Look through at least five blog sites.
  3. Once you’ve finished that, I want you to also watch a few student examples of the final project – the presentation of the inquiry project to your class. Watch the videos below AFTER you have carefully looked through at least 5 of the student inquiry projects on the link above. 

 

 

Category: ELA 9 | LEAVE A COMMENT
April 8

Ap 8/16 A3.1 Your practice samples writing Persuasively – pdf

Before we started this Explaining and Defending a Point of View assignment, we experimented with developing stronger persuasive writing by sharing your individual attempts through Socrative. It was useful to use that app because then everyone’s examples could be read through, and chuckled at, but it allowed for a real-time review and discussion of which Persuasive responses were stronger and then what about the sentences made them stronger.

So the value of that activity isn’t diminished to that one-time activity, here’s the pdf with all your responses collected together.

They’re in random order and there’s no notes with it to indicate the sentences we thought were stronger/more persuasive. See if you can determine for yourself what comes across as a more confident and persuading response under each topic!

A3.1 Assignment – practice developing persuasive tone in writing – socrative samples

More Help Developing Persuasive Tone

This web link here opens an easy-to-understand handout that describes the following ways to improve persuasive tone:

  • Using personal pronouns: you, I, me, we, us makes writing more human
  • Appeal to the head: logic and common sense
  • Appeal to the heart: create feelings of fear, guilt, empathy to move the reader
  • Hard evidence: facts, statistics, data cannot be refuted easily
  • Soft evidence: expert opinions, examples relevant to topic to demonstrate point
  • Incentives: includes rewards for the consumer/reader
  • Humour: can be used to disarm the reader, so they are not so defensive and warm up to your opinion
  • Emotive language: using strong language to express a personal opinion needs to be written in a sophisticated way to stay credible
  • Poetic devices: alliteration, similes, metaphors capture/maintain a reader’s attention
  • Rhetorical questions: a hypothetical question used at the beginning can get the reader thinking about a topic
  • Imperatives: using commanding language to drive the point home (must stand up) usually used at end of writing once trust is gained
Category: ELA B10 | LEAVE A COMMENT