Today students took their Dracula 3 vocabulary quiz. Afterwards, they worked on reading the rest of the Odyssey (pages here: The Odyssey Textbook – Part 2) and completing this reading guide (The Odyssey – Part 2 (Homecoming) Reading Guide), due on Tuesday.

As a reminder, if you missed your vocabulary quiz on Monday, you need to make it up on Friday during lunch. And if you want to order books (Dracula, The Hot Zone, and The Joy Luck Club), tomorrow is the last day to do so!

Today in class we talked about Dracula list 3 vocabulary words. Please make sure that you do your practice quiz sometime between now and Monday (it’s for a grade).

We also read Book 11 of the Odyssey (the Underworld) and talked about it using this PowerPoint: The Odyssey Book 11

Homework for tonight is to read Book 12 from this PDF (1230-1236): The Odyssey Textbook – Part 1

Write a one-page summary of Book 12 and have it ready to turn in tomorrow. During tomorrow’s class, we will watch a portion of the film version of the Odyssey. You are welcome to bring a snack if you would like! 🙂

We read the Circe chapter of the Odyssey (Book 10) and talked about it using the following PowerPoint today: Book 10

Homework was to complete PIE paragraph #3: PIE Paragraph 3

We continued looking into Book 9 of the Odyssey, using this PowerPoint: The Odyssey Book 9

Students then took a reading quiz over the short story “Blindness.” If you were absent, please come Friday during lunch to make it up.

Homework for tonight was to complete the second PIE paragraph: PIE Paragraph 2

I’m sorry for the late posting! I know I typed up a post for Monday, but I must not have hit “publish.”

At any rate, on Monday we took our vocabulary quiz over Dracula 2 words. If you were absent, please come in on Friday to make it up. Afterwards, students read the cyclops chapter from the Odyssey (Book 9) and then a short story of the same episode told from the cyclops’ perspective.

We went over the words for Monday’s vocabulary quiz today in class. Homework was to complete the practice quiz and try doing some Vocabulary.com over the weekend.

We also started writing our first PIE paragraph over the Calypso episode of the Odyssey. Here’s the video of that song, and here is an electronic copy of that assignment: PIE Paragraph 1

We started reading the Odyssey today! Here are the PowerPoints we used to discuss it, in case you were absent: Book 1 Discussion and The Odyssey Book 5

No homework tonight, but I did tell you about two opportunities to boost your grade: 1) the Goodreads reviews of I Am Malala and The Alchemist and the Practice PSAT. You must have those done and ready to turn in to me on Monday if you want extra credit – if you bring them on Tuesday, it will be too late.

Today we discussed a very important writing structure that we will use all year – PIE. Here is the PowerPoint that we used to take notes: The PIE Method for Building Paragraphs (2)

No homework for tonight! 🙂 Tomorrow we start reading the Odyssey!

Homework for tonight is very important! Please make sure that you complete it. Here is the assignment: Podcast Homework

And here is the link to the podcast.

We spent our class time looking at background history and geography for our Odyssey unit.

Today in class, we talked about the qualities of an effective summary. We decided that summaries:

• are significantly shorter than the original work.
• are designed to communicate the main ideas and plot of the original work.
• emphasize clarity and breadth over style and detail.

Your homework was to write a one-page summary of the Trojan War in preparation for our study of the Odyssey.

We also took our Dracula 1 vocabulary quiz – if you missed it, please come make it up on Friday during lunch.