5th Period -- Organized the Cards

Yesterday, the students organized flashcards in teams. The teams placed each root word into categories they made up.

3rd Period Sticks it -- Labels on Cards

Most of the 3rd period class did well with today's activity. Last night while at home, I got on my PC and designed notecards that had the root word, meaning and example words for every item in the directory. And then, I made labels of every root word.

This morning I printed the cards on beige cardstock (cut a page with four cards per page) and ran the labels through the printer. The cards were shuffled and put into five equal stacks (one stack per large table in the classroom.) Then at the beginning of class, each student was given a set of 20 random labels and told to search for the appropriate card and apply the label on the opposite side.

Each student mastered his or her list (except for a few goof-offs) and then Murphy and Jones quiz for each list.

New Unit Started -- Short Film

Mr. Jones introduced the elements of a short story. Students wrote about a memorable story from their lives. Mr. Jones then asked them to identify short story elements from their experiences with stories. The class offered their own definitions for the five elements of a short story which are: character, setting, plot, theme, and point-of-view. One new idea Mr. Jones brought to the class was the point-of-view called, "Innocent Eye."

Then, the students graphed the story line (witch's hat) showed how it could vary in shape and the amount of information in each section.

I was presently surprise by how much these students have retained from previous school experiences with the anatomy of short stories.

Mr. Jones then talked about the video version of a short story is short film He then proceeded to present Imageworks' short called, The ChubbChubbs! Students watched three times. during the second and third viewings, the students identified the elements of the short story in the film on paper.

As a closing thought, Mr. Jones asked each student to think about some ideas for your own short story or short film