S2 Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea

The second episode features in our lesson. This can be found here: Nice Cup of Tea

Enjoy!

Intermediate 1 Homework (due Monday)

You were asked yesterday to complete one paragraph of your essays about sympathy for today's lesson. Your task for Monday is to complete the second. Make sure you work with your 'burger plans' and your notes on theme/symbolism!

Please ensure also that you have completed the webquest and bring it with you Monday.

S1 Holiday Homework

Having viewed some wonderful presentations on the topic of slavery, we are now launching into the book Underground to Canada. Your homework for over the holidays is to finish reading the book. You have had some class time for this already, and you will have a little more next week--use it wisely! As you will know, you should be reading for at least 15 minutes every night. Why not make it Underground to Canada?

I hope you enjoy it!

Intermediate 1 Webquest

UPDATE: due to the power outages/weather issues, many of you were unable to complete the webquest. The deadline for completion is now Monday 9th December.

Night is concerned with Elie Wiesel's experience of the Holocaust. In class yesterday, we identified a major gap in the class's knowledge of one of the central features of the book: Judaism! Today we began rectifying that by starting a webquest.

Here is the link to the site Holocaust and Human Behaviour: What is Judaism?

You are to complete the webquest for Thursday's lesson.

Remember: Use your own words!

Intermediate 1 Night Homework

Complete up to end of chapter 4 in quotes sheet. Identify themes/symbols and give a brief comment about HOW the quote addresses these.

S2 Tea... moving on

Just a quick note to the S2 guys--TeaPigs wrote back saying they'd send us some samples to try out. They win first prize for quick response! What a result. Tetley have also been in touch to say they'd send something. So now we wait...

Do you have suggestions for companies we might approach? I have contacted:

- TeaPigs
- Tetley
- Edinburgh Tea and Coffee Company
- Clipper
- Twinings
- Whittard

We will of course (and you probably saw this coming) be writing thank you letters to any company which chooses to send us goodies (hey, it's an English class, remember? Besides, it's the gentlemanly thing to do.)

Excited!

And an update: Clipper said no, but The London Tea Company have said yes. The next fun thing will be finding out what each company has chosen to send us. It'll be like... Christmas!

Int 1 Key Words (Spelling!)

Here are the key words we came up with today. Make sure you can spell them all (or you'll look pretty silly on the exam).

massacre
Madame Shachter
frontier
ghetto
Transylvania
Czechoslovakia
Holocaust
Jerusalem
Zionist
Yossi
Tibi
barracks
concentration camp
Hasidic
Cabbala
synagogue
Aryans
Buchenwald
inhumanity
waiflike
executioners
Reizel
Maimonides
simultaneously
Zalman
Gleiwitz
spasmodically
Juliek
Antwerp
forest of Galicia
crematorium
crematory
Judaism
Elie Wiesel
Moche the beadle
Auschwitz
Birkenau
Jews
Yiddish
Sighet

ClassDojo

This week we have begun using ClassDojo to help improve focus and to promote excellent work and behaviours. We are focusing in the coming weeks not only on staying on task and participating, but also on the school values: Respect, Responsibility, Honesty and Determination.

You can track your own progress with a student account--you need a 'secret code' for this, which I am providing you. If you haven't received yours, please ask. You can also invite your parents/guardians to track your progress with you. You can either invite them by email or give them the parents' 'secret code' on your ClassDojo sheet.

If that's not exciting enough, you can also track yourself on your phone (or your parent/guardian can!). Just look up ClassDojo in the Play Store for Android, or the App Store for iPhone. Please note, however, that I have had one report so far that the iPhone app for students is not functioning. The parent one is, though.

Why have a student account? Well, once you are fully signed up, you can customise your monster. How cool is that? And more importantly, you can keep track of your own progress.

The website to login as a student is: http://www.classdojo.com/en-GB/

We'll trial this until the end of this term. As always, please do let me know what you think, either in person or here in the comments. Make sure you say your first name and what year you're in so I can give you a more specific response.

Enjoy!

S2 Tea Planning

The S2 boys have been working hard to help plan their learning journey for our next topic...

Szymon and Bartek also experimented with using the 'comments' feature to post some questions they had:

where did it come from?
history/how did it start ?
why pepole like tea than cofe?
when pepole drink it?
how is it made?
how does it grow?
how do you harvest?
were do you drink it (country)?
how could you use it?
is tea inportant to us?

S2 Tea Topic

Today, we had our first introduction to our next topic: Tea.

You were asked at the end of the mini-video I prepared: What would you like to know about tea?

Please feel free to comment with areas you are interested in below. For example, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the following topics:

• the chemistry of tea
• tea in history
• different types of tea
• health
• tasting!

What else can you think of?

S2 Final Projects Due date

As agreed by the class, we will have tomorrow and one more Wednesday to work on the final projects for Underground to Canada.

It is expected that you will continue to work on this at home (yes, that's HOMEWORK).

Final due date is 27th November.

S2 Homework

By next Wednesday, you should have a set of notes and a rough plan of how you will complete your chosen task.

Int 1, 2 and Higher NAB REMINDER

Just a reminder to all S5/6 pupils sitting Int 1-Higher.

Your NAB dates are as follows:

11 November  Textual Analysis (12 November for offset)
25 November  Close Reading (26 November for offset)

S2 Underground to Canada

Final activity choices:

1. Write a review of Underground to Canada for people your age

2. Go back in time.
Visit http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/bhistory/underground_railroad/index.htm and follow in the footsteps of a slave... then complete the story at the end.

3. Research an aspect or type of slavery (historical or modern). Write an essay discussing this topic.

4. Pick your fave abolitionist! Research one of the following, and write a brief biography.
- Alexander Ross - Frederick Douglass
- Levi Coffin - Henry Ward Beecher
- Harriet Tubman - Sojourner Truth
- William Lloyd - Wendell Phillips

5. Your own choice--have an idea? Clear it with me first.

Int1 Chapter One Questions

You are responsible for one of the following questions (as assigned in class--remember your number!)

1. Describe Moche the Beadle. Explain his relationship with the Jews of Sighet, particularly Eliezer.
2. How does deportation change Moche? How do others' feelings towards him change?
3. Why are spirits among the Jews of Sighet relatively high at the beginning of Night?
4. Describe life in the Sighet ghettos.
5. Explain the opportunities for escape that the Wiesels miss before evacuation.

Write a full answer to share with your group and present to the class tomorrow.

S3 Goodreads Accounts

All of you should have signed up for a goodreads.com account by now. If you haven't, do it now! Then add me (use ngreen639@highlandschools.org.uk).

You will be asked to rate 20 books you have read--these can be from all the way back in Primary school!

Any big problems, come see me during the week.

S3 Friday Group Homework: sign up for a www.goodreads.com account!

Intermediate 1: Night

We are now reading Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night.

You should have read up to page 18 last night. Your job now is to finish reading to the end of chapter one, page 34, by Friday. We'll be doing some work on it.

I will publish a guide to reading/our lessons sometime over the next week which will let you know where you should be at any given point in the term. One tip: try reading a little every night. If you read a little every night, you stay on top of the story, and lessons will make a lot more sense. At this level, there's not a lot of in-class time for reading aloud, but we will do some of this as we go along. Lesson time is mostly for contextual work, analysing the text and working out how to write essays about it.

Please do use the vocab 'parking lot'. We'll be working with the words each week.

And please do keep asking questions!

Twitter check

Int 1--has this shown up for you? See if you can manage a comment below!

Intermediate 1 Homework

Int 1: your first essay at this level is due on MONDAY

Choose a poem in which a character or incident or an experience is vividly described.

Briefly state what the poem is about and go on to say what techniques are used in the poem to catch and maintain your interest.

S2 Underground to Canada Vocabulary List

Here are our words for this week:

scant
quenched
savour
fragrance
haggard
dispersed
unkempt
defiant

Your instructions:
1. Look these words up.
2. Write down the definitions.
3. Use them in a sentence.
4. Memorise them!

Spellings will be tested next Wednesday.

S3 Profile

Here it is, everyone:

Link to Flashcard site

Here is the link to the Macbeth cards. Remember that these were prepared by other students (somewhere in the world!), so the explanations may not fit what you are used to hearing. Useful at least for the quotations themselves.

http://quizlet.com/7623875/macbeth-20-key-quotes-for-exam-revision-flash-cards/

And here it is embedded:

Notes and resources from Miss Fyvie

Hi Highers,

Here you can find some revision materials Miss Fyvie has prepared. For those in my class--remember that Miss Fyvie's class did Macbeth and Saving Private Ryan. You will likely find this material helpful.

Thanks, Miss Fyvie!

Remember to REVISE over the holiday. Although you do not have formal homework, you know what you need to do. Right?

See you on the 15th...

Mr Green

3.3 Limericks

Here's the fun video from today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-rN3DGMCsE

Don't forget to upload your own limericks either here or on the class page!

Macbeth podcast

PODCAST

Listen to the podcast above, then consider the essay question below. 

Make a plan, including line of thought and quotations. 

This will be a timed essay task on Friday.

Choose from a play a scene in which manipulation, temptation or humiliation is an important feature.

Explain what happens in the scene and go on to show how the outcome of the manipulation, temptation or humiliation adds to your appreciation of the play as a whole. – 2011 CE Paper

Higher: Lord of the Flies extra material

We've talked in class about "man's inherent evil," a major theme of Lord of the Flies. You may have been slightly shocked today in class when we were thinking of the chapter 'Painted Faces and Long Hair', when I said that the boys had actually done quite well to last so long. You may have wondered why...

Remember the references I made to the Stanford Experiment? No? For info, check here and a recent BBC piece here. When I was looking into studies relating to Lord of the Flies, I refreshed my memory, and was surprised to find that I'd forgotten that the experiment was terminated after just six days. Six days. So if the boys' hair had grown 'long' (probably not so much as we would consider long these days, but still!), then they'd made it at least a month... or possibly much more.

This weekend, I watched two films you might be interested in, as one deals with the experiment itself, and the other addresses what might be considered Jack's style of leadership.  The first was a dramatisation of the Stanford Experiment, and the second takes place in a secondary school in Germany. Both, interestingly, deal with very short periods of time.

Both of these films involve some violence which some of you may find distressing (as an aside, it is interesting to note that in Imdb, The Experiment is rated R, but in Netflix it is 15).

The Experiment (2010)

In this gripping thriller, a group of men volunteers to take on the roles of guards and inmates at a mock prison as part of a controversial psychological study. But when the guards abuse their power in alarming ways, the prisoners stage a revolt. (from Netflix)


The Wave (2008) 
Die Welle (original title)


A high school teacher's unusual experiment to demonstrate to his students what life is like under a dictatorship spins horribly out of control when he forms a social unit with a life of its own.

"High school teacher, Rainer Wegner, may be popular with the students, but he's also unorthodox. He's forced to teach autocracy for the school's project week. He's less than enthusiastic at first, but the response of the students is surprising to say the least. He forces the students to become more invested in the prospect of self rule, and soon the class project has its own power and eerily starts to resemble Germany's past. Can Wegner and his class realize what's happening before the horrors start repeating themselves? Written by napierslogs"

If you do check these out, let me know what you think!

3.8 Crime and Punishment!

Hi everyone,

Task 1: But it wasn’t me!

In Kes, Billy is accused of doing something he didn’t actually do. So is the messenger. Both are punished. Think about a time you were accused of doing something you didn’t do.

First, do a mind map to help your thinking and planning

a

Write a paragraph (or two!) about the incident. Remember to include:

-         What you were accused of

-         What happened

-         How you felt

DUE THURSDAY!

Mindmapping LotF

Click here for the mindmap on Character and Conflict

3.3 Haiku work

For those of you who found it beneficial, here is the video we had on in the background as you were considering the thoughts and images you gathered outside:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJHmDhLVRc

We used the first six minutes.

Happy haiku-ing!

Supported Study Survey

Survey for supported study:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MXFDFRY

Cast your votes! If we were able to offer Supported Study, what would you like to do?

Higher folks:

Recent Prose questions are on your page. Just hit the 'Higher' tab above.

Past questions (2007-10) are below:

Begin assembling a 'quote bank', revising all texts (Macbeth, Saving Private Ryan, Lord of the Flies, All That Glisters, all poetry).

Higher prose fiction questions 2007 to 2010

View more documents from Mr Green

Higher drama questions 2007 to 2010

View more documents from Mr Green

Higher poetry questions

View more documents from Mr Green

Higher Homework

Complete any outstanding essays (your short story and/or discursive essay) for Monday. No excuses! Not even if you're hanging about with semi-famous bands!

That sonnet video...

S3, here it is:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he_lxFaYwAA

Remember, sonnets due TOMORROW!

Higher Questions

Hi everyone,

The practice questions you planned out in class are in the Higher space (tab). Choose one. Give yourself no more than one hour to do it. Go! Go! Go!
You should also be revising your Macbeth and poetry.

See you Monday.