What's Going On in McDonough's ELA Class?

Week Six is beginning!

Students in Ms. McDonough's class have officially finished reading the Holocaust memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel.

Students have also focused their attention on honing and mastering many skills that are essential for success in English Language Arts.

First, students learned how to actively read a text and annotate using the following symbols:

Once students know how to actively engage in a text, they are reading to begin analyzing it. Students can first check that they understand a text by creating a summary, or the gist, of the text. This is different from a paraphrase in the following ways:

Summarizing the main ideas is only the first level of analysis; students will then use the Freitag's triangle to understand the sequence of events and the author's purpose for constructing the story as it appears.

Once students have identified the major conflict(s) in the narrative and how that conflict was resolved, they can then begin determining the author's purpose for writing and the lesson that was intended for the reader to learn. We call this theme. Remember: theme is different from plot!

Having determined the gist, plot elements, and theme of the story, students are now ready to begin communicating their ideas through writing. At PCA, we have a specific structure for creating paragraphs that we want our 8th grade students to adopt; we call it the Quote Sandwich structure for body paragraphs:

Initially, this is the requirement for a Quote Sandwich paragraph; as the year progresses, students will be asked to include even more text evidence per paragraph.

 

Here is an example of what a Quote Sandwich body paragraph may look like:

As students become more sophisticated in their analysis of literature and the written expression of that analysis, the requirements and expectations will evolve. For now, students are really working hard to analyze and write proficiently. Next up, the complete essay!

**For Absent Notes of any of the above concepts, please contact Ms. McDonough!**

Grammar Week Five

Students continue to learn grammar basics and practice those skills during DEAR.

This week, students focused on subjects and predicates, regular and irregular verbs, subject-verb agreement, and collective nouns.



Students must understand that all complete sentences are comprised of these two parts: A) a subject, and B) a predicate.

 

Subjects of sentences can come in the form of any of the above: singular or plural nouns, compound or collective nouns.

Likewise, the predicate of a sentence must contain a verb; the verb may be regular or irregular based on its conjugation into the past tense.

 

Finally, the subject and the verb must always agree!

Grammar Week Four!

Students continue studying their grammar concepts in DEAR here in 8th grade at PCA. Week four saw students covering verb tenses in the past, present and future, as well as the different types of sentence constructions.

Students remember the four purposes of sentences using the acronym D.I.I.E.

 

Students study these examples to understand how we communicate the passage of time in English language.
 

"To Be" is a fundamental verb to understand in all its tenses to be successful in English.