In the last few weeks, the bellwork on Wednesday and Thursday (our long block days) has been done as a competition. Students work with their groups to find all of the corrections, and the first group with all of the corrections gets a punch on their punch cards.
Today many groups missed the apostrophe in 'let's' to show that it's a contraction. They also struggled with the two run-on sentences in the second paragraph.
They also wanted to add the little circle (does that have a name? I feel like I should know this, but I don't.) to show that the numbers are showing degrees. However, since the word is spelled out, those circles are not needed.
What's in a sonnet?
That by any other name would be called a poem.
So a sonnet would be, if it were not called a sonnet.
And yet, a sonnet is a sonnet and a sonnet does as sonnets do.
I distributed copies of the Shakespearean Reference Sheet. I also include a copy of the article from the website Shakespeare Online. This gives students a brief explanation of what a sonnet is in two different ways--paragraphs and a reference sheet.
I asked them to read it three times. It's only a page, so it's suitable for re-reading. The first time, they read it to themselves silently and I asked them to annotate details (main and supporting) that told them what a sonnet is. I gave students a couple of minutes to share their annotations with their group. Could they add annotations to their own papers after listening to their peers? Absolutely.
I asked two students from each group to move to a different group for the second read. This allows students to physically move and get different ideas from different people.
The second time, I read the article aloud, modeling prosody. I asked them to underline new things they noticed. In other words, what new information did they notice that helped them understand what a sonnet is. Again, they shared their annotations with their group members, new and old, and added annotations.
The third time, I read aloud while I did a think aloud. I pointed out the following:
The last thing I did, as closure, was to ask students to write a third quickwrite.
For this quickwrite, students needed to explain the four key parts to a sonnet.
I also warned them that we would be looking at a real live sonnet the next day and it would might just make their brains explode.
If I'd had time, I'd ask students to complete the following additional activity--to create a diagram, chart, or picture to show the important components of a sonnet.
Today's lesson picture was created with Wordle.