January 31, 2012

Period 1--AP 30/ELA A 30 (Canadian Literature)
We are going to be able to split up these two courses until the AP kids are finished with their AP exam in May.  At this point, the two classes will join up again.  In the meantime, Mr. McJannet is going to take over the ELA A 30 students, so , for the most part, I won't be able to keep you up to date, but we do intend to stick pretty close to the same content.  So if parents with students in period 1 ELA A 30 read what I'm doing with the period 3 class of ELA A 30, you should have a good idea of what Mr. McJannet is doing with his class.  On occassion, when Mr. McJannet needs to attend to situations at the office, the A 30 class will come back with me.

For today, the ELA A 30s had their course outline and we brainstormed what it means to be Canadian until Mr. McJannet was able to get there for them.  They will meet regularly in the Home Ec sewing lab (except for tomorrow when they will come to me because Mr. McJannet is away at meetings).

APs--we had a look at their questions from their final exam.  We spent time together analyzing the poems and deciding what a decent thesis statement would consist of.  We started looking at the irony in "Reginald's Choir" from their final exam.  After we are done with this, the kids will do some thesis practice and then start in on some neo-classical poetry.

Period 2--Pre-AP 20
I gave the students their course outline and we went over writing expectations as well as general course expectations.  The students realize that it will be more work than a regular class.  It took some time to go through as this is their first experience with an AP class.  I handed out the AP Resources Booklet that I made up over the summer and guided them through some of the important aspects of the booklet.

Period 3--ELA A 30
We stared out this class on Canadian Literature with a course outline and a look at the two themes:  Diverse Voices and Diverse Landscapes.  We brainstormed together what it means to be a Canadian and spent considerable time talking about stereotypes other people have about Canadians and whether or not they have some basis in truth.  We must sadly report that we do not all live in igloos not have moose or beavers as pets!  We then started discussing our unique Canadian dialects which, of course, led to a discussion of the bizarre idiolects (local speech patterns) here in Outlook.  They were given a handout on "Do You Speak Canadian?" and we're just going through that and will finish tomorrow.

Period 4--Pre-AP 10
Now that these kids are more comfortable with the Pre-AP class, my plan is for them to do a bit more reading and writing.  I gave them a course outline with the required texts and course expectations.  I assigned Dracula to be read by the end of the month.  In order to do some "pre-reading" we did a K-W-L about Dracula and vampires (no Twilight references allowed!) and then looked at a power point where I showed them some of the basis for Stoker's novel, focussing on Vlad the Impaler and some of his nasty deeds.  They will have a few tasks to do while they read, but we'll go over that tomorrow.

Period 5--I have a prep!  Yay!