Typing

Students have been blogging throughout the year and I'm excited to see their progress. It seems to me that overall their posts have become more thoughtful and they seem to look forward to our blogging days.

 

I noticed that when students made grammatical errors, they did not always notice during the writing process. I think our capitalization and punctuation might improve if we spend a little more time focusing on typing. Students will now have a little time to practice time each week, but they are more than welcome to practice at home too!

We are using www.typingweb.com, and students have their log-in information. Feel free to check the site out and encourage your students to practice ... especially with both hands in the right place. :)

Here are the lessons they will be working on in the beginner portion:



Figuring MLA Out

This week, students have been working to format a paper using MLA Style, which is set by the Modern Language Association. They will be using this in high school and we will be using MLA Style later in the year to cite the sources that we find. Thanks for answering any questions they might have had at home when formatting their documents!

Below is a picture of students playing a game to make us familiar with MLA headings. We turned our desks into a sheet of computer paper and laid out the pages silently, so there were multiple hand signals going on!

For the rest of the year, we'll be distinguishing between plagiarizing and paraphrasing so students know how to handle a source when they use it.

 

MLA Basics

This week, we're working with citing things using MLA. When guessing what MLA stood for (Modern Language Association), students suggested My Loving Armpit or Michigan Lakes Association. :)

I know we'll have some learning curves because this type of formatting is new for all the students, but check out this video from Purdue's Online Writing Lab, which is also a great source for information! Eventually, we will move into works cited pages.

A Visit from an Author

Throughout the years, I've really come to believe that each situation I'm in is a chance to learn from someone else's story. This week, that was definitely true in English class! We had a substitute para for the day who was helping students in my sixth hour.

 

The students were working to write dialogue, when the para said, "You know, it's so true. I've written a book and dialogue was the most difficult place to really capture the action and the characters." Our para was Mrs. Donna Boddy, who published the book "Angel on a Mission" in 2011 and is working on the sequel.

 

With a quick change in the lesson, we had time for the students to ask questions about what it's really like to write a book. What an awesome chance for the students to learn! So many of them raised their hands that they wanted to write a book. We have some budding authors!

 

Mrs. Boddy talking with the students. Check out her website at http://donnaboddy.com/.

Blackout Poetry

Seventh graders have been working with punctuation so one day we got to break some of the punctuation rules we had been working with! Instead of looking for correct sentences, we created blackout poems where we took a variety of words and puncutation marks from a Kansas City Star article.

 

 We transformed the meaning of the article from one topic to another. (Below you'll see a poem about bullying. The article was originally about acting.) They did a great job!

 

 



Giving up: I believe that giving up is a kind of joke

 

Decisions: decisions could be simple it might also stretch who we are but who we know we are

 

Bullying: watching bullying can be exhasting. one stopped and the other began.

 

 Love: friends say I love you it's necessary to tell you I want everyone to know feelings are strength

 

Have Trust: I believe God speaks "I love you."

 

Music: When it comes to music it blows my mind it makes me want to laugh it's so brilliant it's really not opinion definitely More than that

Feedback on the Snapshots Unit

2013 8th Grade Class Snapshots

Joe B.

Tom D.


Kyla D.


Bridgette D.


Abby E.


Michael F.


Dylan G.


Adriana G.


Brenna H.


Braedyn K.


Ryan M.


Connor M.


Mykenzie M.


Nick M.


Skylar O.


Madi O.


Ava S.


Zac S.


Matthew S.


Alex T.


Erin W.


Max Y.


Marielle A.


Mac B.


Tori C.


Molly H.


Anna H.


Chris H.


Spencer K.


Andrew L.


Joanna L.


Sophie M..


Kathy N.


Ali O.


Connor P.


Avery R.


Sam S.


Bryce S.


Dylan S.


Shelby S.

br /> Jacob T.


Brady T.


Peter W.