We accomplished a whole lot this period. First, we took a little time to SSR and collect page numbers. Then, we celebrated Poetry Friday with an Emily Dickinson poem called "I'm Nobody! Who are You?". This was great fun, though frustrating for some of you. Frustration can be a horrible thing if you don't work through it and find a way to make progress. I feel like we made some progress today. Some of you were frustrated with the slow process of taking down a poem from dictation. I tried various suggestions that you gave to make it easier, but nothing seemed to really work well. Ultimately, I am using this whole Poetry Friday idea as a way to slow down the process of reading and thinking about poetry and language. It would be much easier for us to just see a poem on a handout or listen to a poem that's read aloud. That's not the point though. The idea is that we need to spend more time thinking about and taking a closer look at language.
After we took down this poem and talked about its connections to Speak, we moved on to reading aloud from Speak. You all seem to have a deep understanding of what's happening in the book and your comments as we read and discuss this book as a class are thoughtful and inquisitive. Bravo.
When we moved on to talking about our final project for this unit, I sensed some real excitement. I don't have any handouts or samples for you just yet, but I can explain what I'm envisioning for our final product. I'll write more about it when I have something written up. Stay tuned.
Next class we're going to write a letter that will kick off production for our final product. We're going to be using our first twelve Words Rock! vocabulary words for this letter. We'll work on this on Tuesday.
