11/7 Quiz & Intro to the Writing Process

On Friday, Nov. 7, students took their first quiz of the quarter on the lessons covered in the first week of school:

• Dynamic Characters: main characters in a story; experiences changes throughout the story.
  
• Static Characters: minor or background characters; they don't experience a lot of changes throughout the story.
  
• Mood: feeling or emotions a reader gets from the story. The mood can be conveyed by the setting as well.
  
• Setting: time, culture, historical period, and place in which the events of a story, poem or play take place
  
• Theme: meaning, moral, message or overarching main idea of a story
• Characterization: process of developing characters in your writing
• Character Traits: attributes or distinguishing characteristics that define a character in a story.
  
• Inference: judgment or conclusion made from evidence presented and prior knowledge
• Metaphors: One thing that representing another; a symbol. Examples of metaphors: Love is a bee. | Their opinions will eventually collide. | Rug rat | Couch Potato | That joke is old.
• Simile: Two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as Examples of similes: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

We then started our lesson on the writing process (from a great website called http://www.sasked.gov.sk.ca/docs/ela/writing01.html)
Step One: Prewrite

• Learning the Prewriting Stage
• Getting ready stage (Tompkins, 2000). This is the time for students to decide on a topic, and to gather and organize their ideas. Donald Murray (1982) suggests that 70% or more of the time for writing should be spent in pre-writing activities. For young writers, this phase is often centred upon a picture that students draw before they write. Older and more experienced writers consider and use a variety of prompts and frameworks to generate and organize their ideas. Some students may wish to explore their ideas through drafting, particularly those who are comfortable with writing as an exploratory process.

Step Two: Compose

• Students and refine their ideas in a composition. Students are "encouraged to get their words and ideas on paper and attempt to spell whatever words they want to use" (Stice, Bertrand, & Bertrand, 1995, p. 216). Students often write on every other line of their papers and conventions such as sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are not stressed during this phase.

Step Three: Evaluate, Revise, Edit

• Gives students an opportunity to take a second look. It is important that teachers understand the wide range of writing activity that falls within the general topic of revising. In some cases, revising might mean beginning a whole new draft, especially if writing the first draft has led the student in a new direction or given the student a new idea. In other cases, revising can mean refining the content, the organization (cut and paste), word choice, and sentence structure. It is important to teach students how to revise. They also can share their work with others and invite classmates to ask questions about the parts they want to know more about (e.g., What kind of cat was it?).
• You may need to go through this step several times before moving to Step 4, the Publishing stage.
  

Step Four: Publish

• Writing is presented in the final format.
• Focus, content, organization, style, and conventions have been addressed somewhere in the previous four stages, and in the final copy. All of the characteristics should be evident in the final copy. This final copy should be clean and correct. Few errors, if any, should appear excerpted from this website.
  

Homework 11/7 11/10 11/12

11/7 Show Not Tell: Setting, Mood, Character Traits & Making Inferences

• Take a line from a story you put on the board and write a story that uses setting, mood and character traits to tell the story.
• Find or draw a photo or image to accompany your story and turn it in with the story.

11/10 Plot, Setting, Character, Theme
Write an autobiographical or fictional narrative (story) in first or third person.

• This should not be a couple sentences long. This is a story you will be using to create your final project to end the Narrative Unit.
• Be sure your plot, setting, characters and theme are developed.
• Use descriptive writing.

11/12 Structure of a Good Story

• You have now written an autobiographical or fictional narrative (story) in first or third person. Now you’ll need to Revise and edit your piece so that it reflects a good plot, setting, characters, conflict, resolution and theme.
• Use the editing & proofreading guide given in class, revise and edit your work.
• Pay close attention to:

Words, phrases, ideas that don’t make sense or could be said better another way.

Spelling, grammar and punctuation errors.

OBJECTIVE
Students will analyze details that provide information about the setting and mood in order to demonstrate their ability to make inferences about specific character traits, culture, time, historical period and location.

Finish Reading "A Mother In Mannville" pg. 60 & complete the "Visualizing" worksheet

1. What kind of place is this? does the author show, not tell?
2. What kind of animals are in the story?
3. How are people dressed and what might this tell you
4. How about the historical period?
5. What are some songs you might hear?
6. What kind of transportation is there?
7. Food?

Independent Writing (10 minutes)
Describe where you were, how you felt, what you heard and what you saw when you discovered Barack Obama was the new president of the United States.

What was the mood around you before and after you discovered that Obama won?

Characterization & Character Traits

Using the strategies practiced in class, complete the graphic organizer below.

Portion of the Text	Character Who is the character in the story?	Characterization What does the character say, do, think?	Trait What trait best describes the character? Why?
pg. 242 Paragraph 4: “I threw it on my brother’s bed and looked at it for a long time before I slipped it on and went out into the backyard, smiling a thank you to my mom as I passed her in the kitchen.”	Gary Soto	tries on the jacket sits on the bed, combs hair, attempts to look “normal” in the jacket thinks the jacket is ugly courteous to mother: “…smiles thank you to my mom as I passed her in the kitchen.”	Gary Soto is respectful. Although he did not receive the jacket he wanted, he still tried on the jacket and attempted to make it look decent on him. Instead of disrespecting his mother for not buying him the jacket he wanted, Gary “smiles thank you” to her and appears grateful for her purchase. Other possible traits are: thankful tolerant polite dutiful

Setting & Mood

OBJECTIVES

• Students will write descriptive stories that show and not tell in order to demonstrate their ability to make inferences.
• Students will be able to analyze details in order to provide information about the setting and the mood created by the setting.

SETTING
(VIBE Magazine)Posted up in a service area just outside the ballroom, Lil’ Wayne stands off in a corner, by himself, leaning on a wall next to a rack of ice and soda machines. Through a set of double doors, 15 yards away, Wayne’s surrogate father and boss, Cash Money Records co-CEO Bryan “Baby” Williams, commands the crowd. As Baby prowls the stage, Wayne fires ad libs into a wireless mic from his perch in the hall then bounds up five metal stairs and into the spotlight—mic in hand, flashing his blinding grin.

CONFLICT
(By Edwidge Danticat)
I met a young woman who under questioning by a military officer was slapped until she became deaf in one ear, was forced to chew and swallow a campaign poster, and was kicked so hard in the stomach by booted feet that she kept slipping in and out of consciousness in a pool of her own urine and blood. Another woman had an arm chopped off and her tongue sliced in two before she was dumped in a mass grave, miles from her home.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
(By Edwidge Danticat)
When I met these women, some time had passed since their ordeals. But they could still feel the hammering of the blows and hear the menacing voices, threatening to drown them, dismember them and set them on fire. The younger woman, Marie Carmel, remembers thinking about her mother. Manman will surely die if I'm killed, she thought. I have to stay alive for her. Alerte, whose arm and tongue were severed, kept thinking about her children as she climbed out of the corpse-filled pit and crawled to the side of the road where she found help. Both had no idea how much pain they could endure until then. They wanted to live, they remembered, to defy their torturers, to tell their stories.

In-Class Assignment
Use one of the telling sentences below to complete the writing assignment.

• My room was a mess. (setting)
• The atmosphere grew tense. (conflict)
• He or She is athletic. (Character development)

Turn the telling sentence into a showing paragraph with examples and details.
Students must write a minimum of one paragraph, but NO MORE than two.
DO NOT use the telling sentence in the body of the paragraph.
USE the telling sentence as the heading.

GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS
Setting: The main backdrop of the story where the story takes place. Elements of setting include time of day, location, historical period, culture, and geography.

Mood: the feeling you think about or feel when you listen to, watch, or read the story. The author’s choice of setting, objects, details, images, and words all contribute toward creating a specific mood. A vivid description of the setting can help you discern the mood of a story.

In Class Assignment
Language of Literature: A Mother In Mannville pg. 60

Active Reading & Visualizing
As you read the story, jot down details that help you visualize the setting of the story in the three seasons below.

Details About Winter	Details About Spring	Details About Autumn
“Sometimes in winter the snowdrifts are so deep that the institution is cut off from the village below, from all the world.”