When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This was the day of the reaping.

–Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

The writer of an article, essay, story or book begins with a lead to draw the reader in–to make the reader want to read more.

In the comment section of this post, share an interesting lead to an article, essay, story or book you’ve read recently.  Be sure to include the author’s name and the title of the work.  See the first two comments for examples.

Before posting, make sure your profile is set to display your name with your three digit number.  I need to be able to tell who is in what class period so I can give you credit for your posts and comments this nine weeks!  Your name display setting is found under DASHBOARD–USERS–PROFILE–DISPLAY NAME PUBLICLY AS…

Check out the introduction message and slide show that students in Mrs. Schoch’s and Mrs. Kriese’s Pre-AP classes made for their iEARN project partners in Russia, Romania, Belarus, Indonesia, Pakistan, Colorado, and Tennessee. The kids did a fantastic job!

We are excited to welcome our Pre-AP students to iEarn  (the International Education and Resource Network ) in a collaborative writing project with eight other teachers and their students from around the country and the world!

Over the next fifteen weeks, we will be learning more about each other and ourselves as we plan a writing project together and exchange our composition work with each other.  Eventually, all ten of our classes will produce a literary magazine highlighting the best of our writing.  The theme and format of that final product has yet to be determined by the students, but that’s part of the fun:  deciding together what it is that we will accomplish.

First things first, though.  We’ve got to open the lines of communication and get to know more about each other.  We teachers have made our first posts to the teachers’ forum, and over the next couple of weeks, students will be creating, taking, and then sharing a survey of who they are as a group of young WRMS Wildcats, Austinites, and Texans.  We’ll gather items for  “welcome packets” (eight of them!) that we can send to our fellow iEarn classes.  As we await welcome packets in exchange,  we’ll be proactive in learning more about the home states and countries of the schools we are collaborating with.

We’ll officially get started on the project next week, but in the meantime, meet our iEarn partners:

Ms. Hockert from Hixson, Tennessee, United States
Ms. Gorelova from Sarov, Nizhny, Russia
Ms. Graham from Dolores, Colorado, United States
Ms. Popa from Botosani, Romania
Ms. Shabbir from Karachi, Pakistan
Ms. Suaib from Bekasi, West Java, Indonesia
Ms. Zubair from Rawalpindi, Punjab, Pakistan
Ms. Mitrofanova from Belarus

Students, do some exploring of these places on your own between now and Monday.  Perhaps you can use Google Earth to take a quick journey across the country or across the oceans to see where our soon-to-be new friends live!

~Mrs. Kriese and Mrs. Schoch

Inspired by this lesson from Read, Write, Think, we are writing poems to help us learn prepositional phrases. Here are two that Mrs. Kriese and her daughter Karen wrote together last night:

Between the cursed lines of a diary’s pages,
Within the ring upon a blackened hand,
From the locket beyond a lake of monsters,
  In a cup among glittering jewels,
In a diadem among abandoned treasures,
Inside a snake under a cloak of scales,
Behind the lightning scar of the boy who lived,
The Dark Lord survives

Harry Potter
Out of the cupboard
On to Hogwarts
At age eleven
Beside loyal friends

Across the years
After so much pain

Into the forest
Among those he loved
With new understanding
Beyond fear of death
Toward Voldemort

Write a poem of your own using prepositional phrases.  Students, perhaps you could revisit your Writer’s Notebook entry about your favorite shoes and where they have taken you and turn it into a poem.  Other ideas include writing a poem about a favorite hobby, sport, book, movie, vacation, game–anything goes!

Greta has learned to take her blanket to bed. She knows that she must hand me the blanket instead of just dropping it on the floor. She is excited that she is a star and has learned to post these videos on You Tube!

Greta has been learning how to target body parts and place them where she is told. She has also been learning digital literacy! Yay, Greta!

Welcome to our class blog!
We are a class of seventh graders in central Texas who love to read and write.  Please feel free to visit our blogs and comment!