Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Steady on, tomorrow is Wednesday

This morning began with an extremely malodorous...person (can you say bum? hobo? homeless person? anything?) on the train. The entire car had a VERY unpleasant aroma. I've never had that experience--that moving down in the car doesn't help. I just shielded my nose with my scarf and it wasn't too bad.

Jess, I blame you for this new internet crack, myspace.com. Goodness gracious.

I really, REALLY need to grade homework. I still have assignments from last week to do. And now two from this week. Tomorrow I won't get anything done at all because of classes. Oh, and if you think I got ANY work done for class, you are totally wrong. If you predicted that I'm a lazy sack of shit when it comes to my own classwork, you are entirely correct.

Ooh, the book orders came in yesterday. At lunch today, some students helped me sort it all. They were so excited, and so was I. I got a giant pile of books, a total of 23 I think, for about $60. Can you believe they have paperback sets of the first five Harry Potter books for twenty-two bucks?! Sweet! On the commute home, I began to read a book called "Goose Chase" by Patrice Kindl. It is fantastic. It's a fairy tale kind of story, with a 'common' and very clever, witty 14-year-old girl central character. I love it already. Go read it if you can.

We did onomatopoeia today. I played my CD with the French song "Comic Strip" for them and had them write down any words they recognized. They heard the onomatopoeias like "pow" and "zip" and "crack". Then I defined the term for them and said that there are an infinite number of onomatopoeias. I wrote a brief vignette in six sets of sentences and they copied them down, including onomatopoeias, then write their own sentences with onomatopoeia. For homework, they will write a one-page story, any subject, with at least five usages of onomatopoeia.

If I must say, it was a perfect writing workshop lesson. A quick minilesson, a workperiod to practice the skill, and homework to further practice and evaluate. Hurrah!

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