October 26

Online Reading and Your Reading Journal

Some students have asked about online reading and if it can be included in their reading journals.  The answer, of course, is “yes, but”.  Yes, but it needs to follow a formula to be legitimate.  Below you will see an example shown in class.

If a student is say, reading online fan fiction on a site such as Wattpad they can apply a formula to tabulate how many “pages” they have read.  But first, the student needs to establish their reading rate.  To do this, look at the example below.  In this example Suzy read for 30 in one sitting and found that she was reading 25 pages in that 30 min. block of time. So she follows the steps below…

  • Take the amount of pages you read divided by the time it took to read them.
    • In this case that is 25/30
  • Then take the quotient as your reading rate.
    • In this case the number was 0.83…
    • This means that Suzy reads about 0.83 pages per min.
  • Then take the amount of time you were reading on Wattpad
    • Let’s say Suzy reads for 40 min on Wattpad tonight
    • Take the time you read times your reading rate.
      • In this case Suzy then takes 40 X 0.83 = 33.2
        • This means Suzy read the equivalent of 33.2 pages online tonight (or 33 pages)
  • Now record that in your reading journal

However, reading novels and other actual “books” MUST be the key focus in your reading journal.  Your goal is to read 20 books this year.  Also, please note that online reading such as Facebook, Snapchat etc. is not “reading time” as it much of it is scrolling, looking at pictures, and does not relate to the focus of reading and understanding literature.  “Reading time” is time spent sitting with fiction or non-fiction books, focusing on the craft of written language.

September 28

Finding Symbols


We have been discussing how to find symbols in literature when reading our book The Hobbit. Students are asked to draw pictures of objects that come up in the book and follow the steps below to declare what they may be a symbol of.

Your assignments is written in the picture below.  There is also a sample of this assignment below that.

Here is a picture of an example that was done when studying The Giver by Lois Lowry

The video below explains the process well.

 

November 29

How to Write Your Works Cited/Bibliography

Today you will learn the online automatic way to generate a bibliography for your research paper.  Whenever submitting work of your own that uses the ideas of other people you MUST cite your sources to give credit to the original people who did the work first.  Also, by citing direct evidence and quotations of people in your research you are also borrowing from their credibility.  For example: if I said that there are estimated to be more than 200,000 galaxies, each with over 200,000 stars on average that sounds like a pretty big claim for a teacher from Arborg that doesn’t even own a telescope.  But if I quoted this fact from Dr. Stephen Hawking as stated in his book A Brief History of the Universe, then it would sound pretty believable.  I have borrowed his credibility to support my own research!

Here is a link to a great free bibliography website and a video on how to use it.

http://www.easybib.com/

here are some more cites that should work too.  Sometimes after the first bibliography the website asks you to turn off the ad blocker.  If this happens then just use another site for your next citation.

http://www.citationmachine.net/apa/cite-a-book

http://www.bibme.org/apa

http://www.citethisforme.com/citation-generator/mla

https://www.qub.ac.uk/cite2write/harvard3l.html

https://www.citefast.com/?s=MLA

 

October 1

The Giver ch. 4-5 questions

You are to respond to the questions below within your duotang for The Giver.  Remember that these are critical thinking responses and should include detail that shows sufficient deep consideration of the content of the novel.  See the reubric below for a reference of the expectations.