Better late than never!

For those of you who check the Team 7-1 blog regularly, I apologize for being a bit tardy with my post for the week of April 6-10. Preparation for 3rd quarter report cards kept me from blogging. Here's a quick recap of what we did in class and what assignments were returned.

On Monday, students began working on the writing portion of Independent Reading Project #3. If you remember back to the beginning of the school year, one of the first activities your child completed was a "Where I'm From" poem. In this poem, students wrote about themselves, their family and traditions, their homes, and the other details of their lives. For Independent Reading Project #3, students were asked to write another "Where I'm From" poem, but this time the poem would be about the main character in the realistic fiction novel they read. Students have already shared drafts of their poems with me, and I'm impressed by the creativity they are showing as they write in a voice other than their own.

"Michaels team has 15 win's this year!"

If you just cringed because you noticed the blantant misuse of apostrophes in the sentence above this one, that's OK. The theme of the middle part of the week in English class was using apostrophes correctly when showing possession. Students practiced their apostrophe use by reviewing and applying the three rules for making singular and plural nouns possessive.

Studying Theme

During the latter part of the week, students defined the term theme, learned how the topic and the theme of a story differ from one another, and identified the topic and theme of different pieces of literature such as a Dr. Seuss picture book and a short article about a shark attack survivor. As 8th graders, students will be interpreting the themes of the novels they read quite often. The purpose of our study of theme in 7th grade is to make sure that students are comfortable defining the term and understanding how it differs from the topic of the story. They will also be creating a catalog of common themes in their heads that they can apply to more challenging works next year.

Returned Assignments

One graded assignment was returned this week. Students got back a 7-point quiz on the structure of the 5-paragraph essay.