ELA 10: Feb. 29-March 4

We didn’t quite get to everything as planned last week due to the snow day, so this week we’ll be playing a little catch up. We’ll be working on three of our learning goals this week: Reading-- Informational Texts, Language--Using Varied Syntax, and Writing--Maintaining and Supporting an Argumentative Claim.

Reading Informational Text Critically: On Friday, students received their scores for the second try assessment on reading and annotating an informational text. We have been practicing identifying evidence, evaluating arguments and identifying bias.  Many students showed great improvement with this!  These scores are posted in MiStar and there is a note with the score indicating if the student’s score improved based on the second attempt.  We will work on this skill one more time on Monday with some in class practice, and students will have a third (and final) opportunity to improve that score in class on Thursday. Students who are still struggling with the skill after our in class practice on Monday should plan to see me in AA on Wednesday for extra help.

Language--Using Varied Syntax: On Tuesday and Wednesday we will continue our work with varying syntax (sentence structure) to improve students’ writing.  Last week we experimented with some different grammatical structures--phrases, clauses, appositives, parallelism-- and students have produced two short pieces (a monologue and an angry letter) in which they have experimented with those structures.  This week, students will choose one piece to revise and edit to show their mastery of varying their sentence structure. Students will have an opportunity to conference with me about their sentence structure on either Tuesday or Wednesday. Final drafts of these short pieces will be due next week.

Writing--Maintaining and Supporting an Argumentative Claim: This week we will also begin practicing turning our annotations of informational texts into written arguments. Students have been assessing the validity of the texts; now they’ll need to organize those assessments into their own coherent arguments.  We will practice doing this throughout the week and students will receive feedback scores in Mistar (not graded) to help them understand how they are doing with the skill.  All of this practice will lead to an in-class essay that students will write at the end of the unit (final week in March). This in class essay is excellent preparation both for the in-class writing they will do in eleventh grade and the SAT and ACT writing they will do in the upcoming years.

Finally, students will meet with their counselors on FRIDAY to complete their schedules. Hopefully, all students turned in their signed course selection sheets last week. If they did not, they need to do that asap so that they may meet in person with their counselors Friday.

Have a great week!

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