Finishing Up Anthem Projects

Just a friendly reminder that Back to School night is next Wednesday at 7:00 pm - will be there with grade prinouts for all the students up to this point.

We are just finishing up our Anthem presentations today and Monday, and the final draft of the Anthem Essays will be due Friday, September 21 and Monday, September 24. The students have already completed a rough draft of their Anthem essay, and will get it back with suggestions and corrections next week. These have been some big assignments, quite labor intensive and have taken up a significant amount of our time. We will be shifting gears next week and starting work on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, which will include a compare and contrast essay (the major writing assignment for the quarter), again pulling information and sources from the book as we read.

In October, we will begin Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and shifting writing gears so the students can have the opportunity to write a creative mystery. This will include character development, plot creation, setting and twists and turns to keep the reader wondering what is really going to happen. I think that the students will enjoy this unit a great deal.

If anyone has any questions, please continue to email or call me.

Finished Anthem

We just finished up the book Anthem by Ayn Rand and have started working on our group projects, that of creating and presenting a Utopian society created by students acting as a historian, human rights activist, scientist and philosopher. We have also introduced the essay that the students are to write. The essay assignment comes from the Ayn Rand Institute and are the essay choices for the annual contest - students who put an honest effort into their essays and have the interest will have their essays submitted for consideration in the contest. You can find more information at http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=education_contests_anthem