Scribe Post - Friday 1/18

Sorry this post is so late, everyone, but hopefully you've been out enjoying the long weekend as much as I have.

If you're confused about this week's schedule, check this post on the class blog. East house doesn't have Ortega's class until Wednesday, 2nd block, so you still have one day to finish your LC reading if you haven't already!

In order of the agenda from Friday:

• SSR

(20 minutes)

• Asking Good Questions

(Right before this we made new assignment #61, LC Discussion Prep 4. For this prep we'll need two quotes, two questions, and at least 1 free choice.)

For this activity, we made new assignment #62, Asking Good Questions. After making a two-column chart in our comp books, Mrs. Ortega called on people to share one of the best questions they'd written down under LC discussion prep 3. (If you need to see the actual questions we wrote down, let me know and I'll let you borrow my comp book.) After talking about these questions and re-wording some of them, we came up with qualities we think a good questions should have with our LC groups. Here are some qualities that were shared with the class:

- thought provoking (not yes/no)
- allows you to take a stance
- answer is not obvious/multiple answers could be considered correct
- has a universal theme

Keep these qualities and the qualities your groups came up with in mind when coming up with questions for future LC discussions!

• Membership Grid

 For Fridays membership grid, Mrs. Ortega gave each of us a yacht. How generous! Anyways, our Membership grid discussions were about naming our yachts. Hopefully you came up with good ones.

• LC Discussion

 Discussion time! We had a pretty nice amount of time to discuss on Friday.

• Class Share Out

Unfortunately, we didn't get to share what we discussed on Friday. Hopefully we will this coming Wednesday.

Okay guys, remember to have your LC discussion preps ready for this Wednesday! Happy MLK Jr. Day.

Scribe Post - Wednesday 1/16

Hey guys, happy Wednesday. The week is almost over!

Alright, here was our agenda for the day:

• SSR

20 minutes, as usual.

• EPT Info

                  Rubric

 Okay, so for this, we entered some new information into comp books under Assignment #54. This stuff is REALLY IMPORTANT, so please make sure you wrote it down in your comp books!

This is how the English part of the EAP is going to look:

-One essay (45 minutes), scored from 0-6, 3 or lower is not a college level essay (4 and above means you're college ready!)
-Multiple choice reading comp. (30 minutes), scored from 120 to 180, anything lower than 151 strongly suggests that you will have trouble with college-level reading.
-Multiple choice composing skills (30 minutes), scored from 120 to 180, anything less than 146 with a low essay score will get you 1 semester (or quarter equivalent) of remedial English.

Here are some helpful sites for the EAP tests, try to look them over to see if they can help you:
csuenglishsuccess.org
csumathsuccess.org

Remember, you can only take these tests once. Do the best you possibly can.

After we wrote everything down, we were given two things to put in our comp books. Under new assignment #59, we put the EPT essay rubric, which outlines how all essays are graded. Under new assignment #60, we put a packet of six example essays.

• Group Scoring Practice

For this activity, we used the EPT rubric to score the six example essays with our LC groups. We gave each essay a score from 0-6 based on the rubric.

• Class Discussion

After our groups finished giving out scores, Ortega told us the actual scores for each essay. Hopefully it gave you guys some insight into how your essays will be scored.

That's it for today. Don't forget to write your questions for LC discussion 3 on Friday!

Scribe Post - Tuesday 1/15

Hey, everyone! This is Alissa, and I will be your scribe for the week!

In order of our agenda, this is how class went today:

• SSR 

20 minutes of silent reading, like usual.

• Scheduled Reading

For this, we continued writing down what we would read for each LC Discussion date. Our last discussion will be on the 20th of February. Hopefully everyone minded the due dates we have coming up when they wrote their reading assignments. These dates were entered under Assignment #52.

• Group Contract

Ortega asked for a few more suggestions about what people could put in their group contracts today. Afterwards, we had to come up with at least 5 contract rules of our own, have each member of our LC groups sign off in our comp books, and have Ortega read over our rules and sign her name. These rules were written under Assignment #56.

• Discussions

 At the end of class today, we had LC discussion two. We had about 15 minutes, and since we were a bit rushed for time we didn't get to fill out our membership grids today. Hopefully we can do that next time. We also made a new comp book entry for our next discussion, which will be on Friday, and that entry was Assignment #58, LC Discussion Prep 3. For this discussion, we've been asked to write 5-7 really good questions for discussion.

That's all for today. See you guys tomorrow.

January 10, 2013

Alright. So we got a new person who is following and watching us in class. Like Mr. Frakes from last year. So be ready for that.

Here's what we did today:

- We talked about literature circles. What went well last time and went bad last time - so we can build on that and make the experience good this time.

- We had our first literature circle discussions. We had to meet our quota on reading, so make sure you do that.



I'm signing off scribe for the last time. Hope you enjoyed it!

January 9, 2013

Hey guys... it's me again. Dean... Alright so we did a big thing today. Those who missed it, you can sit down and rest assured that you're well taken care of with me at the computer typing these words. By the way, Mrs. Ortega wants you all to know that she does check Notebooks. They are not optional. So I hope you all know that. Bah, who am I kidding? No one's probably reading this anyway :(

Here's the thing we did in class:

- We wrote an essay about this woman named Sue Jozui. She isn't happy because advertisements use famous people to sell products (and I thought advertisements were trustworthy. Unbelievable!). We had to explain the argument that Jozui makes by writing the ways in which you agree or disagree in her analysis and conclusion.


So there you have it. Hope I was clear enough. It's simpler than it looks.

January 8, 2013

Hey guys. It's Dean... (excuse my username - I don't know how it got there.)

Here's the day:

- We chose Literature Circle Books. The choices are "The Catcher In The Rye", "The Other Wes Moore", and "The Glass Castle"

- We got our groups for literature circles.



Sorry for the lateness, took me a while to get on this blog. ENJOY.