ESL Writing Assessments

Today the whole class wrote the ESL placement writing assessments.  The writing took the entire block.  We have our informational text quiz on Monday, first thing.

If you need to check the answers to the multiple choice questions for "Writing on the Wall,"  the answer key is here: http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/exams/search/grade10/english/release/key/1008en_pk.pdf.  You just need to check questions 1-9.

Informational Text Review

Today, we read the informational text piece "Writing on the Wall" and students took the multiple choice questions home for homework.  I also handed back the poetry quiz, and we went over the correct answers.

We have decided that the writing assessment will take place on Thursday, for the first 40 minutes of class, and then the informational text quiz will happen on Monday.  Please be prepared for both of these.

Poetry Practice

We have spent the past couple of classes totally focused on the study of poems and poetic devices.  We are working towards a higher degree of comfort and confidence with poetry, so that when students are faced with the task of understanding a poem on their own, on the exam, this won't be quite so scary.  We had great success today with a really tough poem.  Good work, everyone!

A reminder that your quiz on poetry will occur on Wednesday in class, and that your ESL reading assessment is taking place in the morning on Thursday.  We will conduct the writing assessment the following week.

Poetry Review

We spent this morning going over the answers to the questions on the poem, "The Blizzard."  We talked about strategies for reading poems, to make them easier to understand.  For example, be sure to read using punctuation as your guide, and not the ends of lines.

Then, I distributed a poem called "Remembered" and we read it over and discussed who the subject of the poem might be.  We used the details of the poem to help ourselves make the inference that the "he" in the poem was likely an older man, probably the grandfather of the speaker.  We will conclude our reading and discussing this poem next class, and then do some focused work with poetic devices, using  the poem.

Symbolism Paragraph

We began today's class with an exercise on homophones.  We are getting better at knowing which words to use in each scenario!

I then told students about a field trip opportunity - Bard on the Beach, to see Twelfth Night, on Thursday September 12, 2013.  First 30 people to bring $16.50 and a signed permission form will get to go.

Finally, we began working on our symbolism paragraph.  We are generating this paragraph together, so we can review topic sentence construction, paragraph organization and use of quotations from literature as support for our ideas.  We will finish the paragraph next class.

Provincial Exam Prep

We spent a lot of time today talking about the provincial exam, and what we still need to do in order to feel ready.  I want to reassure you that you will be fine on this exam.  You have all worked really hard this year, and you will get through it.  We will continue to get ourselves ready over the next six weeks.

Next class, we will share our symbolism charts and then we will practice putting our ideas/evidence together into a paragraph.