Week 3 Syllabus: June 24-28
ONE KEY TO BECOMING A BETTER WRITER IS to pay attention to what other writers do, especially with sentence structure. This week, we will review your punctuation rules, parts of speech, and the essential parts of a sentence—subject and predicate. Once you have these basic building blocks, you can construct more complex structures and play with meaning and emphasis. That will allow you to think more clearly about a) what message you want the reader to get, and b) how you can emphasize that message in subtle ways with sentence structure and organization. We will only start that work this week, work you’ll continue throughout Freshman year.
MONDAY, JUNE 24
Starting with a news story from this past Sunday’s Chicago Sun-Times. Annotating for whether or not you would enjoy the club/activity described.
Revisiting the “reading to understand” techniques—looking for topics, main idea, supporting details—in our reading comprehension strategies handout.
Practicing paraphrasing technique.
Finishing and posting your paragraphs about R. Banks’ “The Fish.”
Returning to I am the Cheese, and looking for clues about Adam Farmer’s mother’s phone calls. In the second passage, we will look carefully at context clues for the conflict between Adam and the three boys in the diner.
TOMORROW: Working on annotation technique in “Going to School,” and looking for reader’s signals in a non-fiction text.
TUESDAY, JUNE 25
Revisiting what annotation should be. Looking at another scholar’s annotation technique (boxes around names, bold underlining of words, notes on themes) and then choosing ONE question to annotate for in that same story.
Reading your writing aloud to your group (¶s on “The Fish”)
Finishing with our reading from the novel.
TOMORROW: We review punctuation rules! I will give everyone a great tool for correcting punctuation.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26
Inversion day. We are starting with I am the Cheese, brainstorming questions we have, as readers, about the novel (see image below).
Returning to our non-fiction reading techniques, learning about signal language that writers use (more specifically called subordinate transitions).
Reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder”
THURSDAY, JUNE 27
Starting with a Caveletter blog post about rage-posting on the internet.
Returning to the conclusion to Bradbury’s SOT. What is Bradbury’s lesson for his reader (hint: it is NOT related to time-travel or hunting dinosaurs)? You will post these written responses to our squarespace blog.
Returning to the library annotated bibliography project, this time adding notes on a video relating to Hesiod’s “Theogony.”
Closing with our novel, IATC.
TOMORROW: We will start working on comma usage.
FRIDAY, JUNE 28
Starting with an article about Lemon Merangue pie-flavored ice cream.
Writing about your own favorite (or most hated) flavor of ice cream, practicing descriptive writing like we saw in “The Sound of Thunder.”
Taking a punctuation quiz, checking to see who-knows-what about: . ? ! , ; : ‘ “ ( ) - —
Reviewing a grand punctuation guide that will assist you at New Trier.
Returning to IATC.