November 5, 2015

Students are encouraged to keep an eye out for new/interesting words as they read their independent reading books. Today, they shared a word for their Writer's Notebook entry. My word was palimpsest which means "a parchment or the like from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text." It comes from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: "I scanned a leaf particularly and saw that it was a palimpsest" (Twain 6).

We read the last story in the Retellings unit, "The Daemon Lover" by Shirley Jackson (full text here and audio here). As they read, students tracked the major events and characters in the story. This is a pretty long story, so we only had time to read and recap the events today. We'll go more in depth with it tomorrow.

Today's Board
(We actually did Session 6 today, not Session 7. Got a little ahead of myself.)