On Friday, we spent about half of the class reviewing the Dracula 1 vocabulary list for our quiz on Monday. With the rest of the period, we listened to a small portion of Chapter 2 from the audiobook. Homework was to read Chapter 2 and complete the reading guide.

Welcome back from our five-day weekend!

Lots of stuff today. We started with some important announcements:

• Please bring your blue vocabulary book to class tomorrow, as we will be covering Dracula Vocabulary List 1. We will have a quiz over those words (as well as review over gerunds, participles, and appositives) on Monday.
• There will be an extra credit movie this Friday afternoon! It will be Dracula Untold. The film should end slightly after 5:00 PM. If you choose to attend, you must make sure that you are not talking or disrupting others who are trying to watch. I will ask noisy students to leave.

In class, we spent most of our time going over some important background info about the novel (Dracula Schema Guide).

Homework for tonight is to read Chapter 1 and complete the reading guide by going to the “Dracula” tab of the class website, scrolling all the way to the bottom, clicking “Chapter 1,” scrolling all the way to the bottom of that page, downloading the reading guide, and responding to the questions via Turnitin.com. Make sure that you are submitting your assignment to the correct section — if you turn your homework in to the wrong period, you will not get credit.

If you need to enroll in a class, see the class ID for the appropriate section below. The code to join is “chapman.”

If you submit your assignment to the wrong class, you may not receive credit.

Click here for “They Made a Tonic.”

Today we completed a number of things: 1) students read an article about an archaeological excavation of the grave sites of suspected vampires and answered multiple choice questions about it (please come get a paper copy), 2) took your “universal screener” reading exam on the Hub, and 3) completed pre-writing for your body paragraphs for your essay.

On Tuesday, we had a lesson on composing a strong thesis. We used this handout (1 – Thesis), and students began thinking about this prompt (Revenge Essay Prompt – 2017).

Homework was to complete Vocabulary.com for “The Black Count.”

Welcome back! We’re doing a few things to finish up our study of the Count of Monte Cristo this week. Today we began with a chapter from a biography of Alexandre Dumas’s father. (Please come pick up a paper copy of that.) Also, if you have not yet returned your CMC book, please bring it back as soon as you can.

Speaking of books, next week we will be starting Dracula. I explained the (slight dilemma) that we have — the books that the school purchased to lend to students don’t make the page numbers on the resources that we will be using. If you choose to check out a book, I don’t think it will be too much of a hassle, but since the book is so inexpensive and because it’s a more challenging text (which you might want to annotate), I am going to recommend that you purchase a copy. Here is the link to get it from Amazon, or you can bring $5 to school to order one. If you are getting one from Half Price Books or B&N or some other book store, please make sure that it is the DOVER THRIFT EDITION.

Hi students –

I hope that you are enjoying the first day of your holiday break! I’m about to head out to Arizona to see my grandmother, but I wanted to let you know that I have one more assignment to enter – the CMC character chart (to which the extra credit from yesterday’s movie will be applied). I’ll enter those as soon as I get back, but you should have a pretty good sense of what your average will be at this point.

Rest up and be merry, and I’ll see you all in a little more than two weeks!

-Ms. Chapman

As we get through this last week, our priority is going to be finishing reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Tomorrow Reading Guide 9 (CMC Reading Guide 9) will be due; after our discussion, I will give you the rest of class to get a jump start on RG 10 (CMC Reading Guide 10), which will be due on Thursday.

Also – after school on Thursday, we will have a showing of the film version of The Count of Monte Cristo – it takes significant liberties with the story (Danglars is eliminated, Fernand becomes a wealthy aristocrat, and so on), but it’s still fun! If you are able to make it, I would love to see you there.

And as an extra special holiday gift to you, I have arrived at the following decision: to not count your quiz from this past Monday with the understanding that, henceforth, you will study for your quizzes. That means doing the practice quizzes in your blue book, using Vocabulary.com, reviewing your grammar notes, and so on.

The extra credit from the CMC movie on Thursday will apply to something else – I’ll take a look at the gradebook tomorrow and decide what that will be.

On Friday we continued to talk about The Count of Monte Cristo, and I gave you time to finish your character diagrams if they weren’t complete. Here’s the next reading guide (CMC Reading Guide 8).