Jan. 3rd Daily Plan

Hope everyone had a solid Winter Break, and welcome to 2011.

9th Grade - First day of the new year, and we are starting another unit that will be the focus for January.

Freshmen classes are starting a unit on Poetry, and its connections to contemporary music. This first class of the year focused on gauging students' background knowledge on the subject, and providing a basic blueprint for the next several weeks.

In class, we completed an anticipation guide, asking for students' viewpoints on poetic form and content.
After discussing the results from this opening activity, we analyzed the first poem of the unit as a class - Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."

Over the next two week, we will focus on developing familiarity with a wide range of poetic form, terms, and several famous authors.

10th Grade - Another week, another unit. Sophomores have two major focus points before the end of the semester, with this week focused on the concept of inference in preparation for a B.O.E. examination later this week.

I gave students some background information over the concept of inference - basically, how it is an important skill and is used by all people on a daily basis, in many different forms.

The basic inferential process (extremely simplified version)

external, observerable data - data is filtered by the observer - meaning is added - assumptions are made based on meaning - conclusions are drawn from assumptions - beliefs are altered by the added data - process repeats/action taken.

We looked at the inference process by looking at several images, and describing what clues there are to provide the context for the image. Students then did an activity where they had to create captions to blank comics, inferring the meaning of the scene.

We will be applying these skills in more depth to text this week.