Thursday, September 07, 2006

Validate

Kinda nice--the ninth grade English teacher said at lunch today that the kids retained all their grammar knowledge from eighth grade last year when I taught them. He said it was the best he's had in a while. Kinda nice to feel that they remember what I taught them. That teacher and I disagree on the value of diagramming sentences, but ...

And I almost fell into that trap at lunch today, talking about that one kid in all your classes who makes things a little bit difficult. For instance, one has no idea what to write about in his informative (expository) essay and I had the toughest time getting him to say he liked anything at all. So I started a rant. Luckily, I stopped myself--I thought about it and I have had absolutely trememdous classes this year. They are writing in their journals--they go and get their journals too! They are doing the writing and the peer editing. They were into the children's books today that they are going to pick for an oral reading. Fantastic classes so far. I won't let one spoil all the wonderful things that are going on right now.

Children's books for fluency next week, as right now we are also doing an expository essay step by step in those fabulous new Inside Writing workbooks they bought for the kids. Soon we will be able to start Shakespeare and our Shakespeare memorization. With seniors, we start Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and I am so excited about that. Hopefully that excitement will rub off on the kids too.

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