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We started today with a discussion of the short story “Scar.” Afterwards, we continued working on vocabulary – I have asked you to both take the practice quiz within your blue book and practice using Vocabulary.com.

Homework for tonight is to read the third chapter of JLC and complete this reading guide (The Joy Luck Club Reading Guide 3).

Happy Tuesday!

Please remember to consider coming to our special performance with Odysseus on Friday!

Today in class we began our first chapter/short story from The Joy Luck Club! Homework for tonight is the next chapter (JLC RG 2 – Scar).

We also began talking about the second Joy Luck Club vocabulary list. Please try out using Vocabulary.com to help you study.

First, some important news –

We are having a very special guest speaker (Odysseus himself!) after school on Friday! Attendance and participation will be worth 10 extra credit points on next week’s grammar and vocabulary quiz. I think you will really enjoy this event!

Today we took your JLC List 1 Vocabulary quiz. Homework for tonight was to read the first chapter of The Joy Luck Club and complete the reading guide (The Joy Luck Club Reading Guide 1).

We started today by going over the Joy Luck Club Vocabulary List 1 – you’ll have a quiz over only those words (not review ones from the Odyssey lists) on Monday. Remember that you can use Vocabulary.com and your practice quiz inside of the blue vocabulary book to help you study!

Your sole homework for this weekend is Khan Academy. If you haven’t been keeping up with it as your nightly homework this week, I imagine that you’ll have quite a bit of catching up to do. Please make sure that you are really watching the videos – they do an excellent job of reviewing some important grammatical concepts.

We began today with a discussion of the rhetoric used in “The Rape of Nanking.” The information in this text will help us to make sense of some of the plot developments in The Joy Luck Club.

We had about half an hour left in which students worked on Khan Academy. Your homework for tonight is to continue chipping away at the videos and exercises. Please make sure that you are not putting those off!

I know I emphasized this in class today, but just to be absolutely clear – your Khan Academy exercises are NOT due tomorrow.  (Although you should be chipping away at them. I would recommend trying to do 5 to 10 tonight.)

Happy Wednesday!

You had almost the entire day for knocking out some assignments. I asked you to make sure that you had finished the rhetorical analysis of The Rape of Nanking for tomorrow, and I also gave you some time to watch the videos and complete the exercises for nouns, verbs, and modifiers on Khan Academy.

Your Khan Academy work needs to be complete by Monday – you will receive a quiz grade for that. I have asked you to make sure that you are doing some of that everyday so that it doesn’t pile up on Sunday night (and the system allows me to see exactly what you have done at what time every day, so I’ll know if you put it off until the last minute!).

To reiterate: homework tonight is to finish your reading guide and complete some Khan Academy.

Today we talked about Aristotle’s system of rhetoric. Here’s a short video that explains some of it:

I gave you an excerpt from a chapter of a book on the Japanese invasion of China in World War II to read as background for the Joy Luck Club and practice in rhetorical analysis: The Rape of Nanking Reading. That reading guide will be due Thursday (not tomorrow).

We also spent some time setting up Khan Academy accounts. For homework tonight, I would like for you to try doing the nouns activities. If you run into technical issues or can’t get to all of it, that’s okay – let me know tomorrow. This is a new system for us, and we’re working through some of the set-up and glitches.

Today we took our grammar review quiz. We’ll be going over some of the questions that a lot of people missed later in the week.

No homework except to finish your essays on the Odyssey!

A few very important reminders:

• Make certain that you will have a copy of The Joy Luck Club by next Friday. I gave you the option of finding your own copy, purchasing one for $12, or checking one out from Bellaire.
• We’ll also have a grammar review quiz on Monday.

With our time today, students worked in their groups on their thematic essays about the Odyssey. You will have time after your quiz on Monday to finish these, and they will be due on Tuesday.