Monday, April 5, 2010

Welcome back from Spring Break, kids! I hope you paid attention to the Spring Break Speech and made good, judicious choices. I hope to see all of you in good health, ready for the last quarter of your sophomore year (brace yourself for junior year, sophys!) or the last quarter of high school (OMG, APees. Here goes the rollercoaster. . .) I must say that the students who went to Ireland with me this past week were an absolute joy, even amid travel complications with flights and with occasional hailstorms on the Dingle Peninsula. If you know any of the following students, ask them about Eire 2010; they were WONDERFUL. I have been blessed to have taken many trips with many special students, and I was so glad that this trip--my last for a long while--was filled with so much positive energy. Thanks to Brittani A., Alex C., Amy C., Spencer C., Margaret D., Liz G., Julianne H., Madeline J., Corry M., Erin McD., Emily O., Colby S., and Olivia S. Awesome kids, every single one of them.

Welcome back!

Today's lessons:

Word of the Day: surcease

Today's Odd Holiday: National Deep Dish Pizza Day and White House Egg Roll

Author of the Day for the sophys and other curious types: OSCAR WILDE

Gifted English II: Author of the Day and new protocol for this activity; review of the memoir genre; review of "Once More to the Lake" by EB White; "A Whole Society of Loners and Dreamers" by William Allen. Our next outside reading is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, but the novels won't be available for another week or so from the Media Center. If you wish to purchase your own copy for annotation go ahead and order it on Amazon, but be aware that copies will be provided for you eventually.

APees: The Jane Eyre check-reading test is Friday. Yes, that's the Art Show, but since you can pop in and test at any point during the day I fail to see the problem, unless you are like one of the students on the Ireland trip who confessed to having read only four chapters. I proceeded to tell him that he HAD to keep reading to find out about the robots. He is now excited about the novel and I hope he's not too disappointed. . .it's like when you bite into an eclair, waiting for the custard, and you keep going and there is no custard, but you hope fervently that you will hit the custard at some point so you keep going. The robot motif will be his missing custard, if you can follow that analogy. (I have had very little sleep.)

Today, though: Creative Writing based on Jane Eyre. Imagine the strangest character in the novel, and then re-imagine ANY scene from the novel (or that could conceivably be in the novel) from HER point of view. This could be fun.