We finished the notes on pages 43-53--Medieval Era. Be prepared for an open notebook quiz on the chapter in period 4 tomorrow.
We reviewed the literary must-haves list and predicted our marks on our first formative assessment: the Beowulf paragraph.
We reviewed the complex world of citing poetry using the MLA style.
We had a fire drill.
We talked about the paragraphs and the feedback I gave. You are all doing so many things well--diction and style are stupendous. Some of you need to focus on sentence structure and punctuation. Others need to focus on explaining how the evidence proves the thesis. A few of you need to focus on replacing pronouns with persuasive nouns. Some of you need to create clearer thesis statements.
It is clear that you all read and comprehend well and I look forward to watching your writing really grow this year. Choose one or two items on the list that you wish to focus on. For the next paragraph, I'll look for those items specifically. That way you get to choose what you want to improve and how much time you may need to learn the skill.
Adding insight and going beyond the obvious is probably the most difficult skill. I suggest that you really participate during class discussions and push yourself to make interesting discoveries which you may then add to your what? / so what? charts. Once you know what you want to say, you can easily concentrate on how you want to say it.
There is a big learning curve jumping from English 10 to Lit 12. You've given yourself a challenge and I'm confident that you will meet it. Be sure to ask for help and to offer others help when you feel confident with a skill.
Homework: Finish the notes as you will need them for the quiz. The quiz is fill-in-the-blank style so make sure that you have a lot of detail from the text written down.
