September 25/26

English 1 -- In today's class students took their BIG SCARY TEST over Romeo and Juliet. After finishing the test, they turned in the remainder of their work for the play, including their study packets and their last Verona Persona entry. In the near future, students will be choosing their best/favorite two entries to type up and contribute to a class Verona Persona Book. To end class, students created funny, fictitious conversation between a horse and a bear who met each other on a country road. This activity was a fun, easy way to learn how to correctly format and incorporate dialogue into their writing. On Monday we will begin reading To Kill a Mockingbird! Participation Question: What was the moral of your horse and bear conversation?

English 1 Homework
Using the two dialogue rules we learned today (each new speaker gets a new paragraph, and punctuation goes both inside the last quotation marks and at the end of the sentence), add dialogue to your personal narratives. I will check them next class to make sure they are formatted correctly. My suggestion at this point would be to go ahead and type your current draft of the story, so that as we make more changes to them (and we will be making several more), you don't have to keep rewriting it over and over in order to make the additions.

English 2 -- In class today, we started our short story unit with "It Can't Be Helped" by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston. The story provides an anecdote of Jeanne's childhood experience of deportation from her home in Ocean Park, California, to Manzanar, a Japanese internment camp during World War II. In this story, students learned that at the same time that Hitler was rounding up Jewish people and sending them to concentration camps in Europe, the US was rounding up roughly 120,000 Japanese American citizens -- many of whom had never even been to Japan and none of whom were involved with the Pearl Harbor attack -- and forcing them away from their homes and into internment camps. Of course, we discussed similarities and differences between the holocaust and the Japanese internment in order to make sure students knew that the US government did not support or believe in any of Hilter's beliefs or practices during his reign. After the story, students mapped out the Wakatsuki's path of deportation and illustrated the map with pictures symbolizing events and places along their journey. Participation Question: What family heirloom did Jeanne's mother smash on the floor in order to avoid selling it?

English 2 Homework
Finish the map and questions over "It Can't Be Helped" if you did not do so in class today.