12th Grade Language Arts: April 2015

Thursday, April 30, 2015

In-Class:

Journal: Idea for parody or nonsense karaoke
We did a peer review of each others' poems.
Students were asked to volunteer to read poems.
I read out loud portions of the other poems that were submitted anonymously.
We watched a Powerpoint presentation on parodies and nonsense karaoke. Students selected their groups and what they were going to write a parody of.

In-Class:

Journal: Practice grading a poem example on rubric given.
Peer Conferences: With an assigned partner, complete the partner peer conference review sheet. You will be discussing ideas for your own poem, as well as reviewing the grade you gave the practice poem.

Homework:

Journal: Look at the images Ms. Houston puts up on the projector. Write a simile for the first one, a metaphor for the second one, and alliteration for the third one.
We finished the last two rotations of our poetry stations.
Ms. Houston handed out the poetry final assignment choices and had students choose which one they were going to do.

Journal: We read the poem "Disposable Wisdom" by Carolyn Devonshire and discussed what the poem was about.
We talked about rhyme scheme in the poem.
We split up in to stations. There were five stations, including one teacher station. At the teacher station, students discussed "Disposable Wisdom" with Ms. Houston in greater detail. All the other stations had a different poem. Students filled out a worksheet at each station. We completed three rotations.

Journal: What does the word parallel mean? Draw pictures if you need to. What does the word repetition mean?
I gave examples of parallelism and repetition in poetry and then students wrote their own example of parallelism.
Students read and annotated the poem, "Hatred" from our L.A. textbook.
Students did a group activity on the poem.
We discussed the poem as a class.
Students added whatever annotations they wanted before turning in them poem with their notes.

Journal: None
Today there was a substitute teacher (Ms. Houston was on choir tour). He gave historical background on World War II, post world War II, and specifically how it affected Poland and Russia. This was in preparation for our reading of "Hatred" by Wislawa Szymborska.

Journal: Personification- Students looked at examples of personification and wrote their own. We shared in partners and as a class.
Students read and annotated the poems, "Letter to the Past, Present, and Future" and looked for examples of personification and other interesting things that stood out to them. They answered the question at the bottom of the last letter.
Class discussed whether or not this counted as poetry (doesn't rhyme, for example).
We discussed the poems as a class and what the author possibly could have wanted to convey.
Ms. Houston revealed the poems were written by her and gave background on what they meant.

April 6 Journal: If you could cast any movie star you wanted in your one act, who would you pick and why?
On both these days, we read our one acts out loud and discussed them as a group.
On April 8, we did an activity where we had an inner circle and an outer circle facing each other and answering questions. Questions such as, "What is a brilliant movie you've seen? What makes it that way?" and "Which one of the one acts stood out to you the most?" The inner circle rotated with each question.