6 weeks (or so) and counting

It has been forever since I've posted, and of course I feel bad about that. It reminds my of my junior high pen pal and I, who liked the idea of writing letters, but when it came down to it, were never as dedicated as we hoped to be. Consequently we started pretty much every letter with, "Sorry it took me so long to write back". My favorite hard-time giver gave me a hard time about this here blog yesterday, so I decided to spend my recess time casting my thoughts in to the "blogosphere". (I heard someone use that word in a sentence for the first time last week, and it is too cheesy not to put in quotation marks when using it in written form).

Today, as a part of our mystery unit, my class explored the elements of a book review. I have created this nifty sheet for analyzing genres (a term I use loosely to mean forms of writing), and for the two genres we've broken down so far, it has worked quite well. You can download the form by clicking on the link below.

Genre analysis sheet

To use this sheet, my class reads a few examples of a certain kind of writing, such as a book review or a mystery. (For the mystery analysis, I chose a book that we had already read as a class, James and Deborah Howe's Bunnicula, or as one student insists upon calling it, Binocula). Though a discussion of the pieces, we come up with 5 or 6 elements of the genre. For book reviews, we chose the following elements: summary, favorite part of the book, quotations and details, recommendation (or not) and leaving out important information. We record the elements on the genre analysis sheet, define the elements, then look at two example works and pick out the various elements. Finally, the students write, in their own words, what the purpose is for writing in that particular genre. Author's purpose is something that was on the standardized test that they just took, and I think that this sheet is a way to teach that using authentic examples.

That's enough teacher talk today, so I'll end with an amusing anecdote. One of my students had his desk moved yesterday because he would not stop kicking the student sitting across from him. When I talked with him and his mother this morning, she asked him if this has been a problem for awhile. He said, "No, but it was a problem yesterday. I think I grew a lot overnight."