The week prior to Thanksgiving Break saw 7th and 8th graders make presentations demonstrating their knowledge of the short story unit we completed. This was a unique project in that students were able to present in any fashion they preferred so long as they met a few guidelines to show that they understood the content. Most elected to do Slide Shows but I also had poetry collections, art work, animation, and even an architectural presentation! All in all, I think the freedom really helped them to come to a deeper understanding of the texts as they were able to explore them their way. 

This week, we began what will be our final unit of the first semester: grammar. Not always a favorite topic of students, it was met with moderate dismay; however, as we’ve begun our dive into it, I think the students are surprised at how much they are learning and enjoying it. So far we’ve covered parts of speech, and, more specifically, interjections, nouns, pronouns, conjunctions, and prepositions. We’ll continue next week with verbs, adjectives, and adverbs before tackling more advanced sentence structure.