Building on their literary terms from last week, Middle School was assessed on Wednesday for their knowledge and performed well overall.  In order to move their learning away from theory and into practice, this week students are working collaboratively on creative fiction stories.  To this end, I placed post-it notes all around the room containing random nouns, adjectives, and verbs.  Each student was tasked with pulling one of each that appealed to them from the wall upon which to base their stories. Then they were to choose a partner who had either complimentary set, thus making potential for the story more fluid, or a vastly different set to challenge them creatively to bring all the disparate parts together in their narrative.   They have been challenged to include the terminology we covered up to this point and include things like similes and imagery to stretch themselves as writer and put some intention behind their writing practice. They’ve been enjoying the process and will present their work to the class at the beginning of next week. 

High School students are continuing their projects based on literary criticism. Many of them have been challenged by this project and I have encouraged them to keep in mind that this is merely the introduction and that people spend entire careers discussing these theories.  They’ve embraced the challenges and are charging ahead toward their end result.  Their mini-paper and presentation will be due on Tuesday.