Writing 2 Class Notes--Week 14 (12/5)

Hello All! There’s a light at the end of the tunnel and I cannot believe this semester is coming to a close–that means we are starting to wrap things up. The subject of our final Quick Write this week was: hair. As usual, they brainstormed some clever writing topic ideas! The Magical Realism One-Pager assignment was due today. For the Literature part of the class, students shared some insights on what they learned about the genre through reading a short story and whether or not Peace Like A River fit into that genre. Speaking of our last novel, we had a handful of students present their final projects–Elise shared a delicious pie sample and Caroline wrote an alternate ending. They did a great job! Next week, the rest of the class will present. For Writing, the focus today was on sources for our last assignment. Over the break, they were to look for 3-4 suitable sources on the topic of their choosing for the subject of: a historical person. The homework was to bring the physical copies of them today. For this class, we will be using MLA style to compose a type of bibliography called “Works Cited” page. After a slideshow on MLA style 9, students got into table groups and were given a folder with instructions and sources. They worked together to format the more common sources like books, websites, podcasts, movies, and YouTube videos. Though students don’t need to memorize the formatting rules, they do need to be familiar with them. It is super important to give credit to the original source–they don’t want to accidentally plagiarize–and the good folks at MLA have helped to standardize how that credit should appear on the page. On the slideshow we looked at a few online places to help them cite any source. I handed out the checklist for our last composition of the semester. It is the same process as we just did on Squanto, but this time, they have chosen the subject (a historical person), the topics, and the sources. This composition will be three paragraphs instead of two. We quickly reviewed the process: 1. Generate a list of possible topics that are common across all 3 of your sources 2. Choose 3 of those topic ideas 3. Take the first topic you chose (Topic A) and make one (shorter) source outline from each source--there will be 3 source outlines on that topic--one for each source. 4. Choose the best of the best from your source outlines and fuse them into one fused outline. Repeat that process two more times (for three paragraphs in total.) If it helps, use a big piece of paper like we did in class. I haven't posted the Checklist yet, but it's all 5 Dress-Ups and the #2 sentence opener and the topic-clincher rule. The outlines are due next week and the compositions are officially due 12/19–the last week of class. I told them it would be wise to turn it in early. That way, they can get feedback from me to avoid getting it marked “In process” at the end of the semester. Next week, we’ll cover our last Grammar topic–no grammar this week! Blessings on your weekend! Mrs. G Homework Source and fused outlines on Historical Person of Choice Summarizing Mult. Refs.--Historical Person of Choice –Composition due 12/19 Links for this Week About Summarizing Mult. Refs.--Historical Person of Choice Works Cited Practice