Persuasive Paragraph and Newspaper Article

Today students wrote their persuasive paragraph, on a topic of their choice. I allowed students to use their filled out "Seeing Both Sides" planning page, and their model paragraph on the "Trick or Treat" article, as a guide while they were writing. I returned students' quiz on the article "Glow in the Dark" and we recorded these marks in each student's work portfolio. Finally, each student was asked to choose a feature news article from one of the copies of the Vancouver Sun newspaper I had in the classroom. Once students found an article of interest to them, they cut out the article and glued it to a piece of paper. Next week, we will consider how these news articles uses all of the features of news stories we have been studying, in preparation for writing our own news stories.

Writing News Stories

Last week, we read a news article titled, "We Aren't Going to Make It" about two young people whose snowmobile crashed into an icy lake. Frostbitten and hypothermic, they struggled out of the water and managed to find an abandoned cabin. The girl, Angie, was able to call for help, and eventually they were rescued, but unfortunately, the boy, Scott, died from his injuries. We used the article as a text to practice finding the most important points. This week, we are going to use the same article as inspiration for writing our own news stories. We are going to look at the features of news articles, practice with pieces from the Vancouver Sun, and eventually, we will write our own news stories. If you are away this week, you can find the handouts from class at the side of this blog.

Welcome to English 9 Literacy Dynamics!

Welcome to English 9, Literacy Dynamics! I am really looking forward to working with you this year. We have spent the first couple of weeks getting to know each other and setting goals for ourselves. We watched the movie "The Karate Kid" in order to think deeply about how people cope with struggle and difficulty, and we attempted to make connections between our own lives and the situations the character, Daniel, finds himself in. We began our first reading piece today. We started with a pre-reading strategy, called a "Sort and Predict." Then we scanned the article and refined our predictions. We managed to begin the article, with the goal of summarizing the main ideas as we read. We will continue reading this article on Friday.