Back to blogging

In the craziness that was otherwise known as October, this blog was neglected. I apologize to all of you who use this as a tool to help in your success - I should be much better at it now. :)

We have just started reading And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. It is a fun book, keeps everyone guessing clear through the end and will be paired with a mystery writing assignment which is the major writing assignment for the second quarter.

Students have been working on a character chart, as there are ten major characters, and have drawn a map of Indian Island along with having a prediction chart they will be adding to throughout the unit.

Our A days have will have a vocab quiz this Friday, B days will be next Friday.

Thanks for your patience - again, if you have any questions , please post or email.

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

Done with the first full week

Congratulations on making it through the first full week of high school. We have been reading Anthem by Ayn Rand and did some work with Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. Next week we will start the program that we are going to be using for vocabulary throughout the year, continue to work on grammar, and begin to work on the final project that we will have due at the conclusion of Anthem. There have also been a couple of journal entries - please make sure you do the full length during the class and if you don't you can make up the work later. At the end of the quarter I will go through and evaluate the length and quality of the journal entries, so please don't fall behind in these assignments. Have a great weekend.

First Day of School

I hope that you had a good first day of school, didn't get lost and are familiar with where you need to go. Please remember to go over your course disclosure with your parents, have them sign it and bring it back to class tomorrow. Also, remember to put a composition notebook on your shopping list and have it in class by Tues/Wed of next week. Please remember that these need to be the notebooks that don't have any wire on them - they will stay in the classroom for the whole year.

Welcome to CHS English

Hello and welcome to the 2007-08 year at Cedar High School. I hope that you are excited for the start of a new year, and for many of you a start of high school. Please feel free to use the comments section throughout the year when there are assignments that you don't remember or have questions about, tests coming up or anything else that requires clarification. I hope that we have a very successful year together and that everyone has fun while learning.