MONDAY:
Collect reading logs
Journal Entry - Write about New Year's Resolutions - yours or why you don't believe in them.
Booktalks
Summarize one segment of the article on homework (this article follows these lesson plans.
Caught'ya
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TUESDAY
SSR/Book Log
Booktalks
Create a prewriting exercise for your position. Decide on your thesis - your central idea - your point.
A. You may create a cluster, or map
B. You may create an outline
C. You may create a list,
D. You may create a quickwrite,
E. Whatever you use as a prewriting exercise… it must be complex…as complex as my cluster.
Organize your ideas for effect…usually the most effective example goes last.
Type out rough drafts
Caught'ya
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WEDNESDAY
Journal Entry - There are two great tragedies in life: not getting your heart's desire and getting it.
Write a rough draft on the topic of HOMEWORK (for or against homework)
Your supporting examples, stories, explanations must be detailed… you must use specific nouns, names, places, and you should use action verbs.
Booktalks
Caught'ya
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THURSDAY
SSR Book Log
Booktalks
Continue developing drafts of composition
Three paragraphs or more
Caught'ya
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FRIDAY
Journal - Happiness is not a station you arrive at but a manner of traveling.
Booktalks
Add scenes we can see into compositions - snapshots
Add introductions - Stories, narrations, anecdotes, quotes, startling statements, statistics, start in the middle
Add conclusions - summary, call to action, reflect the introductions, touch upon key ideas
Caught'ya
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CAUGHTYA'S
for the week
Monday, January 8
As Leonato led his guests to their rooms Claudio and Benedick discoursed. Hero is the sweetest lady I ever seen shy Claudio sighed. Everyone to their own taste retorted Benedick sarcastically.
Play on words - sarcasm referring to taste food again.
Paragraphs - 3 people speaking
Commas - introductory subordinate clause; quote; quote
Quotations
Regular comparisons - sweet sweeter sweetest
Possessive pronouns - my, your, his, her, its, our, their
Irregular verb - see/saw/has seen
Antecedent/pronoun agreement - "everyone" is singular so "Their" which is plural, cannot be used
Collective nouns and pronouns - common collective nouns (family, everyone, crown, crew, group, etc.)
Tuesday, January 9
Well I don’t see anything in her Benedick continued honestly but that cousin of her’s would be comely if she was not a spiting civet.
Metaphor
commas - introductory work; interrupted quote
quotation
Interrupted quote - punctuation and Capitalization
Contraction
Adverb vs. Adjective - well and good
Verb tense - need for subjunctive in "if" clauses
Spelling rule - doubling the final consonant
Wednesday, January 10
Are you casting asparagus on my feelings do you think my love is not complete like a half-formed wish babbled a frustrated Claudio. No I am not casting aspersions on your feelings. I no that a half warmed fish is less complete then them Benedick blithely corrected his friend.
Malapropism; simile; spoonerism
2 paragraphs - conversation
Commas - introductory word; quote
Run-on sentence - lack of punctuation
Question marks
Hyphen - two words acting as one
Homophone
Often confused words - then/than
Pronouns - They (as a subject) after than
Spelling rules - I before e and doubling the final consonant.
Thursday, January 11
And Claudio taunted Benedick for his views on love and marriage. And Benedick warned Claudio that if he wasn’t careful he would soon be a husband. Benedick then went on and on about how he would never never fall in love or marry. Perdition would freeze over before that would happen.
Aphorism; anadiplosis, euphemism
Paragraph - narrator
commas - subordinate clause before verb; repeated word
Coordinating conjunctions
Verb Tense - need for subjunctive
Contraction
Often confused words - then/than
Negatives - never necessitates the conjunction nor
Verb tense - correct use of conditional tense
Friday, January 12
Like you my freind I swore Id never marry. If it was Hero that would be my wife though I would succumb to cupid’s arrow’s acceded Claudio. Never in a million year’s vociferated Benedick. Not me. I shall die a bachelor.
Metaphor; allusion to mythology, anadiplosis, aphorism
2 paragraphs - conversation
Commas - direct address; introductory subordinate clauses; interrupter; quote
quotation
Verb tense - need for subjunctive
Relative pronouns - who/whom/that/which (who needed as subject; that and which never refer to people.
Possession - singular noun
Often confused words - accede/exceed
Sentence structure - deliberate fragment
Pronouns - I is needed in fragment
Italics - emphasis
Splitting verbs - avoid splitting helping verb and verb.
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HOMEWORK ARTICLE:
Help! Homework Is Wrecking My Home Life!
As many (all?) students will tell you, the amount of homework assigned has reached an all-time high. Never before have students had as much homework as they do now. Students have long railed against homework; are they right this time? Just how much homework is too much? This week, Education World writer Glori Chaika interviews teachers and the top experts -- including Howard Gardner, Carol Huntsinger, and Harris Cooper -- to find out.
The 1990's was the decade of a roller-coaster stock market, presidential philandering, single parenting, college costs spiraling out of control -- and tons and tons of homework!
Is this a new trend -- or a case of history repeating itself? After each national crisis, American teachers have typically increased homework, hoping to prepare American students to compete in the global marketplace. After the Soviets launched Sputnik, A Nation At Risk warned of our insidious educational mediocrity, and Asia began its ascent to power in the global economy, the amount of homework assigned in American schools increased.
When researchers from the University of Michigan compared the amount of homework assigned in 1981 to the amount assigned in 1997, they were astonished. Although minimal changes occurred on the high school level, the amount of homework assigned to kids from six to nine almost tripled during that time! Assigned homework increased from about 44 minutes a week to more than two hours a week. Homework for kids aged nine to 11 increased from about two hours and 50 minutes to more than three and a half hours per week. Many students complain that teachers give too much homework. They may have a point. Busy families with demanding schedules may find fitting lots of homework into an average day difficult. Could the stress of trying to keep up do some students and families more harm than good?
Summarizing and retelling text are important skills for any student (or adult) to acquire. Understanding texts and reducing them to smaller chunks of information is helpful to students for study purposes. Also the skills of summarizing and retelling help a student to more fully understand the information they’ve read or heard. They are compelled to learn how to identify what is crucial in the text and how the sequence of that information determines its meaning. It challenges them to remember information and events, making them interact with that information. It reinforces good reading because to summarize and retell, they have to read the text repeatedly, getting more fluent each time. Finally retelling is its own form of assessment, since the students’ performance confirms that they read it and reveals the extent to which they truly understood what they read.
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Directions:
1. Read your assigned segment of the article "Help Homework is Wrecking My Home Life!"
2. Pick out the important ideas and facts. You can underline, circle, or markup your copy to help you remember what’s important: I suggest that you circle names and facts that need to be mentioned. Underline ideas that can be summarized and retold.
3. Retell/Summarize your information on a separate sheet of paper. Be sure to explain the meaning of the heading (the subtopic) that begins your segment.
4. Be prepared to read your segment in class or to a classmate. We will be writing a persuasive composition on just this topic.
Example:
The title of this article is "Help! Homework is Wrecking My Home Life! " written by Glori Chaika for Education World. Just as the title implies, it would seem that Chaika has identified problems that homework can cause for families. For years students have complained about the amount of homework they have had to complete; maybe in our modern society their cries are more valid than ever. In order to prepare this article Chaika has interviewed teachers and experts.
The 1990’s has been a decade of many exciting events and tons of homework. Historically, after many national crises, American teachers have added more homework to their assignments in order to help students prepare for competition in a global marketplace.
Researchers from the University of Michigan discovered that homework tripled over the years from 1981 to 1997, for kids six through nine. Minimal changes occurred on the high school level. Homework increased from 44 minutes per week to more than two hours for kids from six to nine. For kids aged nine to 11, homework went from two hours and 50 minutes to more than three hours per week. Busy families have trouble fitting all this homework into their schedules. The stress of having to complete all this homework might be more harmful than helpful.
#1 IDEALS VS. REALITY
"Teachers should devote energy to creating homework that is stimulating and provocative rather than banal," Howard Gardner, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the creator of the theory of multiple intelligences, told Education World. "And parents or mentors should go shoulder-to-shoulder with youngsters, helping to motivate them, thinking of ways in which to help them without giving the answer, and being aware of the child's special gifts and weaknesses."
It sounds great, "but you need parent input for kids to perform, and with the increase in single-parent families, there's no one at home to help," veteran fifth-grade teacher Loretta Highfield told Education World.
"It isn't that the kids don't want to do homework; the majority of my students don't have the skills to go home and do it independently," added Highfield, a teacher at Florida Avenue Elementary in Slidell, Louisiana. "Even young students are not getting the help at home that they used to."
The same seems to hold true for older children. "I have students who have been thrown out of the house or have a financial situation brought on by an ill parent," Northshore High School (Slidell, Louisiana) teacher Kathleen Modenbach told Education World. "There are others whose after-school jobs pay for car insurance and clothes or whose involvement in extra-curricular activities, private lessons, or sports leaves little time for homework.
"For some students, a lot of homework can seem irrelevant," Modenbach added. "High school students become expert at evaluating the validity of assignments and assigning priorities to them. Kids who wouldn't dream of cheating on a test or copying a research paper think nothing of copying homework. I find students will do homework when it must be done to pass the class. Anything else is a waste of time and feeds into the vicious circle of beating the homework system."
Therefore, as kids deal with assigned homework in their own ways -- or grow increasingly frazzled -- their too-busy parents are uncertain what to do. Some, wanting their children to be academically competitive, demand extra homework, while others wonder just how much is too much.
#2 ASK THE EXPERTS FOR HOMEWORK GUIDELINES
"Check out the National PTA and the National Education Association guidelines," University of Missouri psychology professor Harris Cooper, author of a pioneer study on the effect of homework on student achievement, told Education World. "For children in grades K through 2, homework is most effective when it does not exceed ten to 20 minutes each day. Children in grades three through six can handle 30 to 60 minutes a day. If educators and parents expect homework far out of line with these recommendations to result in big gains in test scores, they are likely to be disappointed."
After reviewing dozens of existing studies on homework and researching hundreds of students and parents, Cooper found that although doing homework may begin to pay off in secondary school, little correlation exists between homework and test scores in elementary school.
Carol Huntsinger's research, however, had different results. Huntsinger, an education professor at the College of Lake County, Chicago, also investigated the study habits of young children. She found that for her sample, work done at home did make a difference.
Huntsinger compared the homework habits of middle-class immigrant Chinese Americans with similar European Americans. The Chinese American first graders she studied spent more than 20 minutes per night on math homework -- some of which their parents assigned. European Americans averaged just five minutes. When tested, the Chinese American children performed at higher academic levels than did their European American counterparts. In a longitudinal companion study of European American and Chinese American children from grades 5 through 11, Huntsinger found that those disparities continued through high school.
"Parents' beliefs and practices are very important influences on their children's academic achievement," Huntsinger told Education World. "We got similar results for European American children in our study whose parents taught them in ways similar to those Chinese American parents used. ... I looked at time spent on parent-assigned homework, school-assigned homework, and the formality of parents' teaching methods. Most other studies have focused on time spent on school-assigned homework only."
#3 HOW IMPORTANT IS THE QUALITY OF THE ASSIGNMENTS?
Cooper found the effect of school-assigned homework on standardized test scores for students in lower grades to be minimal or nonexistent; however, the homework completed by the students Huntsinger studied was not necessarily schoolwork but focused on themes the families felt were important. Just how big a difference is there between the quality of typical school-selected assignments and those parents tend to select?
To find out, researchers funded by the Consortium on Chicago School Research asked teachers to evaluate the quality of 1,400 math and writing assignments for third, sixth, and eighth graders from 12 different schools.
"According to criteria established by prior research, the teachers found fewer than 30 percent of the assignments evaluated even minimally challenging," University of Wisconsin professor Fred Newmann, one of the study's authors, told Education World. "It will take a significant commitment to staff development to help teachers ... change their teaching sufficiently to promote more authentic intellectual work."
QUALITY VS. QUANTITY
However, when it comes to older children and math, quantity, or the number of assignments, is what matters, according to associate professor of economics Julian Betts of the University of California, San Diego. Betts examined surveys on the homework habits of 6,000 junior and senior high students over a period of five years.
"It appears to be the overall extent of (math) homework assigned and not the amount that is graded that matters," Betts told Education World. For older children, the quality of assignments had absolutely no influence on math achievement!
Students who did an extra 30 minutes of nightly math homework beginning in grade 7 increased their achievement scores the equivalent of two grade levels by grade 11. Differences in achievement remained -- though at a slightly depreciated level -- even if students stopped doing the extra homework.
"Overall, the best advice for math teachers in middle and high school seems to be that homework can be very effective and helps the bottom kids just as much as it helps the top students in the class," Betts told Education World. "As long as homework levels are maintained at a reasonable level, and teachers in different subject areas carefully coordinate homework assignments to avoid overloading students, an hour of assigned homework appears to be about as effective as an hour spent in the classroom."
#4 HOMEWORK CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
A review of the research in the field, , published by ERIC's National Parent Information Network, found that high school students who receive school-assigned homework perform 69 percent better on standardized tests and have higher grades than do students who don't. Junior high students who receive homework perform 35 percent better; and elementary students perform about the same.
That does not mean elementary students should have no homework, only that grades or results on standardized tests do not measure the benefits of homework.
Currently, the prevailing feeling is that students need homework to stay competitive in the global market -- that the extra work and responsibility give kids an edge. There is a problem, though, if family time is minimized and children no longer have time to play or if students don't graduate because of failing homework grades. Experts suggest approximately ten minutes of homework a night, starting in first grade, with an additional ten minutes each year. They also stress, however, the importance of teachers' addressing the issue of assignment quality.
"Unless one is prepared to have lots of supervised work at school, there is no way that one can avoid homework for youngsters after they've reached the middle school years," Gardner told Education World. "But before assigning homework, one needs to have clear goals, share those goals with children and parents, and make sure that those goals are being achieved. Otherwise homework is an idle exercise."
So the experts agree: Homework can have a positive effect on achievement as children grow older. Despite the experts' stress on monitoring the quality and quantity of homework, many students are left trying to cope with a huge, often boring, homework load. They wonder -- is anyone out there listening?
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