Monday, February 1 - Friday, February 5

Friday
Today we were in room 100 for the entire class to give everyone a chance to work on the essay for Unwind. Draft 1 of the essay is due on Tuesday, February 9. The rubric for the essay was handed-out in class on Thursday and it can also be found in the links section of this blog.
The topics for the essay are listed below.

• Discuss the value of human life as it is presented in the book.
• Discuss government control as it is presented in the book.
• Discuss survival as it is presented in the book.
• Discuss parenthood as it is presented in the book.

Thursday
We tried some new techniques to add to our toolkits for persuasive writing: transitions
embedding quotes. Tomorrow will be you chance to get the draft of the Unwind essay well underway, or even done! See below for some good info about essays.
essay writing: http://www.grammarcheck.net/ultimate-essay-writing-guide/
Wednesday
After silent reading, we looked at two strong examples of grade 9 essays to pull out of them the elements of quality essays. This produced a bunch of post-it notes with your ideas about quality which I will turn into a rubric that you can use to write your essay, and I can use for the assessment/evaluation of your essays.

Tuesday
Happy Groundhog Day! During silent reading, I handed back the essay practice about introductions and we tried writing a hook/general opening in the form of a question. Remember! Your first sentence can be a question, but your thesis should not be a question. Following that, I handed back yesterday's thesis statements and we tried choosing a different topic for the essay and writing a new thesis statement. Towards the end of the class, there was time to get down to writing the introduction of your Unwind essay.
Monday
We are going to focus on English for most of this week in order to get the first draft of the Unwind essay completed by the end of the week. So, we reviewed thesis statements and why they are so important and where they appear in the essay. Next, I offered four topics to choose from for the subject of the essay. We practiced writing thesis statements and sharing them with others.
I collected the SQ3R work that was done related to pages 150-154 in Crossroads.