This week in Mrs. Nickows seccond period class, we read scenes out of the book A Raisin in the Sun. The picture to the left shows characters Ruth and Walter in the kitchen. Walter looks confused about the paper in his hand and Ruth looks worried.

Picture for week of 11/22-11/26

This week, being a short week, we spent most of our class time learning correct comma usage. The picture above speaks for itself on the importance of commas. The rest of the week we either played word riddle games or observed Thanksgiving weekend.

11/22-11/26

This week, we played a pretty cool game. Ms.Nickow gave each of us a note card with a picture on it, we had to find the other person with the same picture and describe ideas and thoughts related to the picture. This game taught us about abstract and concrete nouns. Abstract nouns are things you feel and concrete nouns are things you can touch and see. The next day, we learned about how commas are really important on the ACTs, we should know how to use them, and when to use them. In this short week we had a great time learning.

picture for week 11/1-11/5

This week we started to watch the 1992 movie version of "Of Mice and Men." The movie stars John Malkovich, as Lennie Small, and Gary Sinise, as George Milton.

10/25-10/29

This week we played a very fun game called Balderdash to enhance our understanding of vocabulary words from "Of mice and Men." This game is played by five people going up to the front of the room in which only one of them have the actual definition of whatever vocab word they are desribing. The other four people have a card telling them to make up a definition for the word. For example; four people have a minute to make up definitions for words like confided, beligerantly, and bewildered. The winner is the person that made up a definition but also got the most votes and the one who wins gets to pick an item out of "The Mystery Bag of Fun." It was a great game to have fun and learn our vocab at the same time.

Week of 10/17-10/22

This week we started reading "Of Mice and Men" by John Steinbeck. We all guessed that this book had something to do with farms, and we were all right, sort of. Its not about men who have a farm. It's about men who work on different farms. The main characters are two men named Lennie and George. Their relationship does make the story all the more interesting. We also learned that John Steinbeck is an artist. He paints pictures with his words. For example, the first two pages of "Of Mice and Men" were all about the place where Lennie and George were, and what Lennie and George looked like. The place was so clear in my head. I see why John Steinbeck is such a famous author.

Picture with caption week of 10/11-10/17

After our unit test this week, we made predictions on what we thought the book Of Mice and Men was about. We looked at different covers of the book and changed our thoughts a bit when we saw a new cover.

-Joey Resis

Week of 10/4-10/8

On Monday, the class got into groups and we started an activity, the groups were chosen and were given a vocabulary word from the short story "The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson, and each group had to do a skit on the meaning of the vocabulary word, so we practiced our skits. On Tuesday it was a shortened period because we had a late start, but we started off reading our independent reading books for twenty minutes (which we do every Tuesday and Thursday). After that, we showed our skits to the class. On Wednesday the class took a survey on each of the learning styles, and everyone had to raise their hands to show Ms. Nickow who had each major, minor, and negligible style preference for each of the learning styles. Although we took a while to do this, we still got through it, then we started reading the short story "Marigolds" by Eugenia W. Collier. On Thursday we first read our independent reading books, then we finished the short story "Marigolds" by Eugenia W. Collier, and we had a class discussion on it. On Friday, we played a review game for all the short stories we read to prepare for the unit test this Tuesday.

Picture for Week of 10/4 - 10/8

On Wednesday, October 6th, English102P2 read "Marigolds" by Euginia W. Collier. We all rotated reading, and after we finished the short story, we discussed the innocence and compassion of the main character, Lizabeth.

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I know that it is not my week to blog but I would just like to say that the reading journal link does not work.

Week sept/27- oct/1 and Picture for September 27 - October 1

This week we read the "The Lottery," a popular story from 1948. The basic plot is that there's a town with a tradition. This tradition involves holding a lottery every year. The winner of the lottery is stoned to death in the hope that the sacrifice will bring a good harvest. However, this is not entirely revealed until the end of the story, but is given in small hints known as foreshadowing. Through the whole story though, everyone appears to have no bad intentions, but they all turn on the poor winner of this lottery. This is a form of situational irony (explained in the previous entry). In class we held our own lottery, except the winner got rock candy. =( I didn't win.



Contributed by Ben:
This week we watched 2 movies about the short story lottery.  The lottery is a sad story about a ritual/religion concept.  In the lottery there was a village with only a few people every year there was a lottery to sacrifice someone for the harvest.  Whoever got the slip of paper with a black dot on it was stoned to death.

Week of 9/20-9/24

On Monday, we had to write a Quick Write on what we thought would happen in the second part of "The Story of an Hour". Everyone had their own opinions on what would happen. After we finished discussing that, we all got our characterization paragraphs and went over them. On Tuesday, we had independent reading and re-read "The Story of an Hour". On Wednesday, we had another quick write on what our quiz would be like for the next day. We finally got to read the second part of "The Story of an Hour", and talked about it. After that we got to head down to the Book Fair and see what books we were going to read. Also, we saw other books that some of us could be interested in reading. On Thursday, we all took the quiz on quotations. Finally on Friday, we had a Quick Write on what would happen if we all wore the same clothes. We all had different ideas on what would happen. Then, we went over the three forms of irony, which are either dramatic, verbal, or situational. Later, we watched some videos and saw some pictures on irony and had to guess which kind of irony it was. For our homework, each of us got a notecard and we all have to write either a dramatic, verbal, or situational situation.

Week of 9/13 - 9/17

This week in class we learned about integrity. We brought in news articles that show people who either have alot of integrity, or none at all.

Week of September 13 - September 17

Can you imagine being arrested for giving water to thirsty people?  This week, we read an article about someone who was arrested for littering after leaving bottles of water in the desert so that people immigrating into the United States wouldn't die of thirst.  This is an example of a situation in which it is hard to decide if a person has integrity or does not have integrity.    Each student then found their own example of a news story that exemplied someone with a great deal of integrity or very little integrity.  Our text for this week was the short story "Thank You M'am" by Langston Hughes.  It told the story of a young boy with little integrity and the woman who  helped him learn right from wrong.   We learned the difference between observations and inferences, which is something that many of us are also discussing in our science classes.  Our class also became authors when we played a musical chairs writing game to work on transitioning from one idea to another. 

week of 9\6- 9\10

This is what we did last week in English. We read the short story called "The Necklace." We wrote a charicteristic paragraph on a charecter from the story. We also had a discussion about integrity. Our class did a t-chart on "The Necklace" also.



Steveo

This week we as a class are starting a Blog to show others what we have done over the past week. Either you post a picture to the blog with a caption or write a paragraph. Two students have been picked to post each week for either the picture or the paragraph. It is supposed to be a way to communicate with the parents. The post that the student has posted is part of their homework grade.

Picture for week of August 30 - September 3

We used "My Life in a Paper Bag" as a way to get to know our classmates.  Each student brought in, and presented, three items that they felt described them.  We learned about hobbies, childhoods, families, cultures, and more.  It was great to see that we have things in common with each other that we didn't even know about. 

Week of August 30 - September 3

Our week began with presentations of "My Life in a Paper Bag" from each student in class. It was a great way to get to know some unique and surprising things about each other. As the week went on, we wanted to be able to summarize events in a story, but we weren't sure if we were including too much (or too little) information, so we learned a quick and easy way to formulate our summaries! Following the Somebody, Wanted, But, So format (used in the previous sentence), we summarized the events of the short story, "The Necklace", written by Guy De Maupassant. On Friday, we visited the Fremd Media Center to hear about some great books and select one (if we hadn't already) for our independent reading projects.