Like yesterday, students were giving each other specific feedback on their recent essays.
We had time to read and reflect. We ended our day by collaboratively writing our Bunraku play. HOMEWORK: Come tomorrow with 1 creative suggestion for our play.
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We reviewed some common mistakes found in recent essay submissions including:
Students had time to receive and provide feedback on essays. We continued working on writing a script for our Bunraku-style play. If any students have paper towel rolls, old wire hangers, old fabric, and/or twine/fishing line, please bring them to class for our puppets. Thanks! Students had time to edit their Spirited Away essays. Tomorrow we'll have a peer editing checklist. We'll edit for a couple days and submit final drafts on Friday.
Students also had time to read & reflect and then work in small groups on our Japan play. Today, we started discussing writing, producing, and performing a short (10 minute) play in the style of traditional Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre. We talked about what Bunraku looked like and watched a video about puppet manipulation. We set some parameters for our story:
To foster our story-telling mindset, we reviewed some fundamentals of story telling. We used the very short film, Dot., to talk about structure. Students were given time to construct an idea for our play. We will discuss our ideas on Monday and move forward from there. Students had time to finish up their workbooks from yesterday. We reviewed some of the big ideas from the last few weeks of Social Studies including:
I was away at a professional development session today. In my absence, students were given time for independent reading and then given time to work on a Social Studies work booklet. I'll be back tomorrow with Spirited Away essay comments/suggestions and we'll have time to finish up that work booklet as well.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get the Spirited Away essays returned today. I'll return them tomorrow and provide one class in the Learning Commons to revise.
Today we read independently, analyzed the quality of the writing, and started working on writing a short story. In Social Studies, we reviewed the Frayer Model of building vocabulary. Each student was assigned a vocabulary word from our Japan unit. HOMEWORK: complete Frayer model handout (clear, detailed, visually engaging) and be ready to explain your word to the rest of the class. We had our final class for writing our essays today. I'll collect essays tomorrow and return them on Monday with some feedback/suggestions. I'll collect your final drafts on Wednesday. Note: we won't have time in class to make changes to our essays - this work will have to be completed outside of class time. I can stay after school to let students work on the computers in the library on Monday.
Also, we'll be displaying and presenting our science body systems projects tomorrow. Grade 9s will be around to watch your presentations, ask questions, and provide feedback. Thank you to our parent volunteers for this successful field trip! I've received a lot of positive feedback from our students who had a great time. I wasn't expecting it to be quite as bawdy as it was, but I do think it was a fun and lighthearted introduction to theatre for many of our students.
Tomorrow students will have 1 period to work on their essay (due Friday) and 1 period to continue learning about Edo Japan. We spent one period today working on our essay which is due Friday.
We spent one period going over the incredible, over-the-top, confusing, and bizarre plot for tomorrow's play Twelfth Night. Reminder: we'll have a chance to snack before we leave and when we return, but we won't be able to eat on this field trip. |
AuthorMr. Spencer teaches Grade 8 Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, and Drama at Mount Royal School. Archives
May 2018
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