We started today's class with SSR. You all had books with you and have been reading in your free time. We even had one finished book and a completed Novel Response Sheet in today's class. We'll save these Novel Response Sheets and write blog book reviews when we all get our laptops.
I will read along with you every class and will tell you about the book I'm reading. I just started my book today. It's called Why I Fight by J. Adams Oaks and I'm reading it for a new book club that Ms. Simpson (from the Middle School) and I have recently kicked off. I'm loving the diction and the description in this book already. I'll tell you more about it when I've read more.
You're going to have a special guest visitor on Thursday who'll talk with you about sexual assault. In preparation for this discussion, we read the first ten pages of Speak together and collected evidence that there's something seriously wrong with the main character as we read. We found that she:
-is glared at on the bus
-is excluded
-sits alone on the bus
-is basically called a "ho"
-sees her ex-best friend Rachel mouth "I hate you" at her
-is laughed at in the hall
-engages in self-mutilation
-describes herself as "clanless"
-is laughed at by 400 people in the lunch room
-is struck with mashed potatoes at lunch
-is already counting down the days until high school is over
-has a very sarcastic tone
Hopefully, you'll be able to point to some of these as signs that something is very wrong with this girl during your discussion with our guest visitor.
After we read from Speak, several of you finished your "They Say, I Say" poems. Before you all got down to business, I asked you to pick out a word from your poems that could use a color other than the black or blue of your pen to help express the meaning or feeling of the word. One example that was pointed out was the word "coward". The person who selected this word said that he would write it in yellow. Another student said that the word "unique" in her poem should really pop out on the page with the color blue.
I will collect the rest of these poems in Study Skills this week.
