Lesson Plans April 13-17 - April is Poetry Month!

  Gary Soto 

 Soto Web Page      Video

Language Arts 

Warm ups: freewrite, poem, vocabulary

Essential Questions

• How does a reader draw conclusions about a text and analyze imagery and sensory details?
• EQ's: How does a writer use point of view? What is irony?
• EQs:  How does reading AR books impact your achievement level?

Vocabulary

Cores 1,2,3. Define the words. Use them in a sentence. Study. Quiz on Thursday.

(+ Core One - Vocabulary text Lesson 3  - complete exercises 1,2,3,4, Quiz on Friday)

One Last Time Vocabulary

1. imagery
2. ramble
3. foreman
4. feeble
5. madras
6. stoop
7. contractor
8. irate
9. predicament
10. clods

Language Arts Assignments for the Week of April 13-17

Before Spring Break we read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - excerpt 395-400
Review - Point of View 401
Review - Style and Humorous Tone 401
All students complete on paper - Analyzing the Text 402 #1-7
All students complete - Performance Task 402: Writing Activity Analysis
All students complete - Critical Vocabulary 403 #1-8
All students complete - Vocabulary Strategy: Verbal Irony and Puns 403 #1-4

One Last Time - 405 to 414
A memoir by Gary Soto 
All students complete on paper - Cite Evidence - 415
Analyze the Meanings of Words and Phrases - 415
Analyzing the Text  #1-7, 416
Critical Vocabulary  #1-8, 417
Vocabulary Strategy chart on 417




Homework for Language Arts Classes

         

• READ AR Book for 40 minutes every night.  Take three AR tests before May 27 
• Finish classwork for the day
• See the board for daily assignments  

Poem

"A Red Palm Poem"

Gary Soto

 

You're in this dream of cotton plants.
You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds
Fall with a sigh. You take another step,
Chop, and the sigh comes again,
Until you yourself are breathing that way
With each step, a sigh that will follow you into town.

That's hours later. The sun is a red blister
Coming up in your palm. Your back is strong,
Young, not yet the broken chair
In an abandoned school of dry spiders.
Dust settles on your forehead, dirt
Smiles under each fingernail.
You chop, step, and by the end of the first row,
You can buy one splendid fish for wife
And three sons. Another row, another fish,
Until you have enough and move on to milk,
Bread, meat. Ten hours and the cupboards creak.
You can rest in the back yard under a tree.
Your hands twitch on your lap,
Not unlike the fish on a pier or the bottom
Of a boat. You drink iced tea. The minutes jerk
Like flies.

It's dusk, now night,
And the lights in your home are on.
That costs money, yellow light
In the kitchen. That's thirty steps,
You say to your hands,
Now shaped into binoculars.
You could raise them to your eyes:
You were a fool in school, now look at you.
You're a giant among cotton plants.
Now you see your oldest boy, also running.
Papa, he says, it's time to come in.
You pull him into your lap
And ask, What's forty times nine?
He knows as well as you, and you smile.
The wind makes peace with the trees,
The stars strike themselves in the dark.
You get up and walk with the sigh of cotton plants.
You go to sleep with a red sun on your palm,
The sore light you see when you first stir in bed.

 

 

 

Social Studies Core 4 Homework
Listen to the news and bring in relevant, recent news stories to discuss. Write a summary and reflection of one news article for the week.

Geography Quiz

CNN Student News
EQ:What is happening in the world and how does it impact our lives?
Every day the class watches CNN Student News. Ask Jake or Gian to run the computer projector.
Discuss the news stories.

Social Studies Lessons

Students will view the DVD "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till." Students take notes about the important parts. Pause the DVD and discuss it halfway through. Important ideas - Segregation, Civil Rights, the South then and now, racial profiling.   Then resume  the DVD.