We began our day today with a devotion about trusting in God--and trusting that his commands are for our good and are worthy of obedience. A theme throughout our devotions has been perseverence, and we certainly need to persevere in trying to obey God and make right choices!
Today we took another look at two poems we read earlier in the year: "To the Children" and "Change". Students reread the poems and looked for similarities and differences in the poems. They found similarities in the message and audience, and they found differences in the style and images used, among other things. After listing these similarities and differences, we talked about what it means to compare and contrast the poems. Students wrote paragraphs in which they compared and contrasted the poems; their paragraphs included a topic sentence and supporting sentences. Several students shared their paragraphs in class, and we all benefitted from hearing others' work. We noted words that were especially effective in comparing and contrasting and wrote them down in our notebooks.
We added the pair of words it's and its to our list of homophones, and we practiced using each word correctly. Remembering that it's always means "it is" is the key!
We spent some time talking about our RR journals and the content of entries. Students saw that many of their written responses could be improved with added explanation. We looked at some sentences from student journals and added details; we practiced the kinds of explanation that would improve an entry. We also took a look at the length of entries, and after averaging the length of page-long letters, students will now write 125-word or longer letters. (This will, I think, provide more uniformity in length than page-long letters.)
We had a little time for reading and responding, and before we knew it, our class time was over. As I told the students, "Time flies when you're having fun" --or maybe more accurately for them, "Time flies when you're working hard!"
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