This week, we are working on newspaper writing, based on the books that we have been reading individually. We started off the week with a scavenger hunt through the newspaper, before we learned how to write our own cover stories. These "newspapers" we are creating are written as if we are a reporter in the world of our book, reporting on important events and people. Finished newspapers will be posted on the site soon!
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On Monday, we finished our vignettes and started our poetry unit. We read Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay" as a case study in poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance, personification, and rhyme. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we continued to work on poetry. In preparation for writing our own poems, we wrote journal entries about the places from which we come. Then, we began to apply the concept of stanzas—a group of lines, or a verse—to that material. We hope to create "Where I Am From" poems in which we describe our origins with as much imagery as possible. We also went to the pool on Wednesday and played water polo! It was, to most of us, a new and possibly "uncomfortable" experience. However, it will provide us with great writing material. Hi, everyone! Here's a short update on the great first day of school we had today: We introduced ourselves to each other through a series of questions—we grouped ourselves together, or formed lines, to answer questions such as "What type of music do you like?" and "How many languages do you speak?" After we introduced ourselves, we started on our first journal entries of the summer. ~*~*~*~ Tuesday was all about imagery. We learned that imagery or the figurative language in which it can take shape is largely sense-based, and that it is imperative in creating a full, arresting atmosphere with words. On Wednesday, we learned about the importance of tone by watching two trailers for Mary Poppins—the happy original trailer, and a fan-made, "spooky" trailer. We then exercised our new knowledge by going to the lily pond and writing about the scenery in various tones. When we came back to the classroom, we thought about instances when we did something for the very first time. Some memories were full of joy (e.g., gaining admissions to Punahou, catching a wave, or getting a dog), while others were shocking or scary (e.g., shucking corn and finding a bug inside—ew!). Thursday found us tackling a notoriously tricky set of homophones: they're, their, and there. We hope that our review of this will help us in our upcoming stories. We also read examples of personal narratives to get us thinking about how we might want to write our own stories. After making some formal choices about what we want to include in our stories (e.g., tone, details) we got to work on our rough drafts. |
