AP Lang: Sept.25-Oct. 6

I’ll be out of town next weekend so this week I’m letting you know what’s happening for the next two weeks.

Students are doing well so far with monitoring their own work and spreading things out (I think). This would be a great weekend to have a little check-in chat with your student about how that is going. One thing to ask about would your student’s notebook. We are working on “filling out contextual pools”--deepening our knowledge of the world around us---by keeping track of current events or history that we learn. Another great thing to ask about would be your student’s independent novel! They all seemed to start strong with independent reading, and I hope to keep that momentum going.

Next week will be spent practicing for our first unit reading test. Students have been working on annotating texts to show they understand a writer’s choices. This is important for their critical reading because it helps them consider what an author is trying to make them think/do/believe with a text.  It's also important as they think about their own choices as writers. Why am I writing this? How can I craft this to make others understand my purpose? This week we will do a number of practice annotations together to make sure everyone is confident with the skill, and then at the end of the week students will take a graded assessment.  The more students practice and respond to feedback this week, the better prepared they will feel for the test!

The following week we will begin our next unit. This unit’s thematic focus is education: To what extent do our schools serve the purpose of a true education? The skill focus for the unit is research and synthesis writing. Students will use the critical reading skills we honed in unit one to read various perspectives on education and come to their own conclusion about a research question. By the end of that week (Oct. 6), they should be able to tell you the focus of their research question!

Have a great weekend!