2016-17 school year: days 25, 26, 27 & 28

by Mr. Maynard ([email protected])

To my students and their parents, I apologize for not updating the Daily Diary this week, but at least we had school this week with what could have been! I was honestly fighting uphill all week long after the no-strike announcement at 12 a.m. on Tuesday

and the end of Game Three of the Cubs-Giants at 1:40 a.m. With all that said, here's a quick snapshot of the week. 

• In Writing, students did a great job peer editing their classmates' first drafts of their personal narratives, providing "Praises, Questions, and Suggestions" (PQS) for all five sections. I look forward to reading these first drafts in the next week or so. On the grammar side of things, we continued doing our Daily D.O.L.s and started learning about the difference between independent and dependent clauses. 
• In Reading, we continued reading from Because of Mr. Terupt, finding examples of foreshadowing that previewed the bigger conflict later in the story, learning about flat vs. round characters, and examining the mood, or feeling, of the month of "December" in this novel. We also began our next unit on the Close Reading Signposts for Fiction, beginning with the first (and possibly my favorite) signpost: Contrasts and Contradictions (when a character acts opposite of what the reader would expect). We explored this signpost in Langston Hughes' brilliant short story "Thank You Ma'm," during which a young boy tries to rob an old woman who will tolerate no such behavior. We also reviewed our week five vocabulary words with a vocabulary word sort today. We will have our next vocabulary quiz on Tuesday and continue with the "Close Reading Signposts" next week.
• In Social Studies, we stayed up to date with the latest current events happening in the world, including Hurricane Matthew's devastating effects on Haiti and the southeastern United States, the second presidential debate, and chilly relations between the United States and Russia. More importantly, we continued our exploration of the U.S. election process, examining a bar graph about voting trends from 1984 to the current day and learning about the electoral college, or as Homer Simpson likes to call it, the electrical college. :-)