The ENG3U – Grade 11 English class is approaching the middle portion of Macbeth. This is the point where the main characters really start to develop as the conflict and plot move upwards and onwards. It’s time for our class to dig a little deeper into the play to look at how the language, events, and narrative elements are all contributing to the story.

We are going to go back to the seminar model to accomplish this. First, students will read the scenes of Act 3 in class. Students will then work on annotating their texts, covering them with sticky notes with their thinking. Students will then work in groups to put their thinking together on chart paper. Finally, students will post two seminar questions on a Google Sheet so we can discuss them next week!

Looking forward to a great discussion!

It’s been a very strange week with an ice storm closing GCHS for an almost-unprecedented two days. Seriously…the last time the school actually closed for a storm was 1996. It was pretty bad. It did, however, give everyone an opportunity to rest up, catch up, and get ready to take on the second half of the semester, (which is here already).

ENG3U Grade 11 English students have moved into the Macbeth unit. Already, students are grasping the language and meaning of the play through a variety of  reading, writing, and performance tasks. It’s great witnessing students really grasping the content of the play and owning it with their interpretations of how it should look and sound when performed. This is probably my favourite unit – but I also know that performing is a huge fear of students. My goal is to help them overcome that fear.

Prior to Macbeth, we finished the very short Short Story unit. Each student found a short story to focus on, with the task of analyzing the story and creating something that represented an idea or theme within the story. Huge props to those who created some pretty awesome artifacts: creative presentations, a dramazation of the story, a paint-ball image of an eye, a twisted Scrabble board, and a beautiful graphic novel were some of the great examples of students choosing how to show their thinking. Here are some pages from the graphic novelization of The Sound of Thunder:

Meanwhile, in ICS2O – Grade 10 Computer Science, we have begun exploring HTML. After spending several weeks on Python, I am pretty sure students are happy to be using a programming language that is both easier to reference and more visual. By the end of the first two days most students seem to have a good grasp of the basics of…basic HTML. Our next move is to apply our knowledge by creating some web pages. We’ll then start learning more code including something called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which is a way of controlling the flow and appearance of content on websites.

The beauty of this unit is that it becomes a very marketable skill for students. They’ll be able to go out and potentially profit from making websites for local businesses! I’ll share samples of student work as soon as possible.

Thanks – and have a great week!

My Grade 12 University Writer’s Craft eLearning class has prepared this amazing collection of poetry. This class includes students from Red Lake as far east as Mattawa – a driving distance of about 19 hours! I don’t share much about this class on WilsonTeacher.ca because the course exists in a different environment, but this material is too amazing to not share.

Download (PDF, 4.72MB)

Thanks again to the contributors for their work!