Q1: Week 7 - Posts for 10/2

Two posts for this week:

1. Reading response: You may respond to your outside reading book or "Harrison Bergeron" or "To Da-Duh, in Memoriam."  Please consider either identifying questions at levels 1, 2, and 3 (explanations here), describing the plot map so far , or analyzing characters in your outside reading book.

2. A Flash (short short) story - a fictional piece in about 100-200 words - Consider the ones we read in class or see 100wordstory.com for more.  How much story can you pack into this small number of words?  (Please keep it school-appropriate)

Q1: Week 6 - No posts this week

Because of the personal narrative, you do not have posts due this week.  You will have vocabulary and reading logs as usual.

Q1: Week 5 - Posts for 9/18

Our posts for this week:

1 - Reading response - push yourself for new things to talk about and use the sentence starters to guide you.  Alternatively, you can update us on your personal narrative (what you are excited about, what you are struggling with, what you have questions about, what you'd like advice on from your classmates), or you can respond to the reading or other work by Naomi Shihab Nye.

2 - Dialogue - your second post should be a dialogue between at least two people or characters.  It should be engaging and be punctuated and formatted correctly (like in fiction, not a script; this will be graded).  The length and substance should be equivalent to a regular blog post, though you will have more than two paragraphs if you are formatting correctly.  Here are some ideas for conversations:

• a conversation between two liars in which each line has a double meaning
• a conversation among three characters in which no line is more than three words long
• an exchange between two characters in which one character only asks questions and the other only answers
• a conversation between two characters from two different books or works (make sure to tell us who the characters are and what books they come from)

Q1: Week 4 - Posts for 9/11

For this week, you have two posts as usual.  Please review your comments on previous weeks and use them to raise your game.  A few notes of things I'm seeing frequently that you can avoid:

• commonly confused words (exiting/exciting, lose/loose, there/their/they're)
• missing apostrophes for possessive nouns or added apostrophes for plural nouns
• lack of formatting for book titles (italics)
• more than 25% of the post spent summarizing the book
• posts that don't reflect the prompt clearly

I am also working on a collection of great posts from these first few weeks that I'll be putting up in the next couple of days - stay tuned.

Your posts this week:

1. Reading Response: you may respond to an outside reading book, or you can respond to one of the narratives we have been reading in class.  As usual, limit your writing about what is going on in your book or in the narrative to a couple of sentences and keep the focus on your ideas.  

2. Dear ____-year-old: Watch the video "How to Age Gracefully" (from CBC Radio WireTap).  Write a letter of advice to someone at an age that you have passed, based on your experiences.  Make it interesting - try to avoid things they might hear frequently!  (Yes, it should be longer than the advice in the video - please make it the standard 2-paragraph length by choosing one or two pieces of advice and explaining them).