April 20th Daily Plan

9th Grade - We only have a few more days of prepwork before starting to read "Romeo and Juliet" on Friday, and today was focused on getting some background knowledge of the author, as well as an introduction to Shakespearean English.

In terms of background, I gave a very brief biography of Shakespeare, and students who missed class can come pick up the notes from me.

In terms of Shakespearean English, we worked with three main ideas today - omission, contraction, and sentence structure. In everyday speech, students use a significant amount of omissions and contractions - for example, the sentence - "I'ma go to the store" literally implies "I am going to go to the store." Four words are omitted, but because we are so used to it, it is easy to infer the meaning.

The exact same thing occurs with Shakespeare's writing, however, because it is in an older style of English, it can be confusing. Student have a list of common omissions/contractions to reference when reading.

The other important focus was sentence structure. Oftentimes, Shakespeare will change the subject-verb-object order to create a better rhythm in his writing.

For example, in the sentence "I went to the store" -

I - subject
The store - object
went - verb

So the sentence can be re-ordered as -

"To the store went I"
"Went I to the store"
"The store, went I to"

They all have the same meaning, but the ordering of the parts is modified.

10th Grade - Today was the last day in the library to work on the Dissecting an Ad project. Students were shown a model of what is expected in their presentation tomorrow -

1) What is the product/service and where is it being sold?
2) Who is the target audience, and how can you tell?
3) What strategies are the marketers using to make their product appealing?
4) What are the fallacies found within the advertisement?

Everything was due at the end of the class period for full, on-time credit - that means students had to turn in the ads they used, the written component, and a copy of their presentation (generally PowerPoint).

Because we are only going to use tomorrow to present, students must have their presentations by tomorrow morning. Turning this in later than tomorrow will still get credit, but the presentation component will be deducted.