This unit focuses on the theme of movement.  We will be reading selections on everything from tap dancers to the movement of tsunamis to "House on Mango Street."  Students will have a new set of 15 vocabulary words each Monday with tests on Fridays.  Also, students are focusing on identifying different types of independent and dependent phrases and clauses.

Yesterday, students read Shakespeare's "The Seven Ages of Man" and began writing their own poems based off of this sonnet.  In the coming days, we will coming exploring more difficult texts by next reading The Call of the Wild.  We will have a short vocabulary test Friday.

This week students are continuing to focus on verbs and sentence combining.  However, now students are facing the more difficult task of learning the meaning of root words.  For example, this week we learned that if "incredible" means "not able to be believed," then "credible" means "able to be believed" and "cred" means "to believe".  These root word tasks are essential to making high schools on the ACT and are part of new English Standards handed down from the TN State Dept of Education.