second quarter ideas

I haven’t written for the blog for a while, and there has been something on my mind for a while, so I figured it would be a nice way to dip my toe back into the writing waters. But before I do that, I’ll touch on some “school” stuff.

We’re now into the second quarter. Our reading focus is now on fiction. Students are to read six books this quarter, as with all quarters. The choice of genre is as follows: three different types of fiction, one nonfiction, and one poetry; the sixth book can be of any genre the students’ desire. Along with all this reading, we’ll be studying literary elements: plot, setting, character, conflict, theme, and mood. In response to the reading, students will either participate in the Letters About Literature writing contest or write a response to literature, journaling as if they were a character in a fiction book of their choice. Hopefully, should we find the time and seek the depth of learning, students will get to create their own fictional stories; I’m still seeking ideas and thinking about how this might take shape. 

As for writing, we’re moving beyond the “building blocks”—capitalization, parts of speech, end punctuation, internal punctuation—and looking to increase our sophistication as writers by continuing to practice diversifying our sentence structure through sentence combining. Along with growing more sophisticated in our sentence structure, we’re hoping to see variety and sophistication in the organization of our writing—moving beyond five paragraph essays or rigid story structures to something a bit more pleasing and a bit less predictable. It won’t be easy work; it will be challenging and hopefully push us beyond our comfort zones a bit, but this is necessary for us to grow as readers and writers and thinkers.

I’ve added an open ended feedback form on the blog, so if you have any type of feedback, it could even be a question or a concern, please feel free to send it my way. Thanks!

And now, since I've been writing all weekend but am not quite "there" yet for sharing the other bit of writing that I've been doing, I'm only going to post this. Look back soon and hopefully you'll get a bit less school and a bit more "real world" writing.