1984 and Romeo and Juliet Scribes etc.

Welcome back. I hope you all had a restful break and are ready to finish the school year off strong. While we are reading 1984 and Romeo and Juliet, we will have class scribes posting directly on this blog the various accounts of each day. Everyone will be required to do this one day. Here's an example from last year:

6th Hour Manzanar Scribe

Today we started off class a little slowly, because everyone was having side conversations, and then someone asked Mrs. Moritz how her daughter was doing. Mrs. Moritz said her daughter had some sort of virus, and might be sick for a little while, but should get better relatively soon. After we finished with all the side conversations, we found out about the Farewell to Manzanar final assessment. For this final assessment, we have to make a speech-like presentation to the class. The topic of the speech is: Think of a time when you were in a really tragic, depressing, scary, or overall bad situation and even though it was tough, you made the situation the best it could possibly be. An example Mrs. Moritz gave from the book is how Jeanne took her time in Manzanar, and even though it was a bad situation for her, she tried to make her time there the best it could be, and later came back to Manzanar, even though it changed her life so much. Mrs. Moritz also gave a personal example of when her brother-in-law died. She said it was one of the hardest times in her life, but in the end, his death caused her to want to have children, so she could always have a piece of her husband. Mrs. Moritz said that you can write an essay/outline for your speech, but she won’t grade it or even see it. She will only grade off of the oral presentation. Don't just read from your essay/outline during the speech, or you will get a bad grade. We will do the speeches in front of the class on Wednesday, but if you feel strongly about not speaking in front of the class, see Mrs. Moritz to arrange a time to do your speech for only her. After discussing the Manzanar final assessment, we got back into our groups from yesterday to work on our character maps. Yesterday we filled the inside of our characters, but today, we did the outside influences on our characters. We filled the space around our characters with anything from the outside world that had an effect on the character. While working on our character maps, Mrs. Moritz called us up by our Final Assessment/photostory groups. We received a rubric/checklist outlining all the parts of the project that we need to have done. We will have two days in the lab next week, Tuesday and Thursday to work on the project. Homework was to work on both the Manzanar and photostory final assessments.





Thursday, May 10, 2007
1st Hour ManzanarScribe

Hello everyone!
Hope you all had a relaxing Thursday...

May 7th Scribe:

Today we started out by discussing how our scored discussion will work when it comes around. Once again, people disagreed about what makes a successful discussion in a class of 30-odd students, but Mrs. Moritz will make the final decision about the future of our Manzanar final.

Moving on...

Mrs. Moritz put us in groups based on our row in the classroom for a creative project of sorts. In our groups we were supposed to create a character map for the one main character assigned to us. One person in the group is traced on the long sheet of paper. Today's focus was on the soul of the character. We were supposed to describe and draw what defines and fills the character's soul. For example, the heart of the character would be drawn, and inside the heart would be pictures and descriptions of what s/he truly loves.

Tomorrow we will focus on what influences the person's actions, (how the outside world effects character).

Ta Da!