Writing 2: Writing 2 Class Notes

As is typical the week before Spring Break, we had a few absent from our class today. One of the beauties of homeschooling is that we can take trips with the family as is needed and necessary with very few repercussions! We missed those who were gone, but had a fun class anyway. If you were absent, be sure to check these notes very well ;)

For our Quick Write, students are continuing their efforts to write some original poetry. Last week, we wrote list poetry. This week, they generated questions of all kinds and then attempted to arrange them into a poetic form.

For Writing, I reminded the class that their Evaluation Essay Rough Drafts will be due when we get back from break. Make sure you bring a copy to class for Peer Review. I hope to get Grade Reports out over the break, so it’s a great time to make up any work that might be outstanding.

For the Grammar portion of the class, we had a special lesson on the semicolon. Most people (students and adults alike) are confused about the bit of punctuation; they use it as a comma or as a colon. I use the Reese's peanut butter cups as an object lesson. Ask your students about how the semicolon is like this candy. They also have 2 worksheets to practice putting semicolons and colons in the right place. Since we missed the grammar from last week, we took the opportunity to catch up on that in class as well. We practiced working with parentheses, dashes, and ellipses Most of the students finished these worksheets in class.

After that, we had a little fun. We played a game called “Poetry for Neanderthals”--a fun add-on to our poetry unit. Normally, poets use thoughtful phrases and descriptive words, but a Neanderthal isn’t capable of such flowery language. They only speak in 1 syllable words. We broke into teams and played a few rounds. The object was to get their teams guess a specific word using only one syllable words as clues. If you slip-up, the other teammate gets to club you with a stick! (In this classroom version of the game, the opposing team member whacked the table with an inflatable club!)