Room 19 Fairview Middle School

Students paired up to write a limerick style poem about dreams according to the following rubric:

Students chose a folktale (a story with larger-than-life humans, talking animals, or even magic) they enjoyed reading in our most recent Literature Unit and rewrote it in their own words, in modern times.  Enjoy!

After reading Snail by Langston Hughes, I asked students to write a couplet about what they speculated a animal might wish for.

Little snail,

Dreaming you go.

Weather and rose

Is all you know.

Weather and rose

Is all you see,

Drinking

The dewdrop’s

Mystery.

Write one paragraph about a relative. It can be a description of a favorite or not so favorite relative.  

Style:  More than many other types of essays, descriptive essays strive to create a deeply involved and vivid experience for the reader. Great descriptive essays achieve this affect not through facts and statistics but by using detailed observations and descriptions.

Halloween makes us think of frightening entities and haunted houses. For this week you will be writing a descriptive paragraph on attending a Haunted House on Halloween night. Brainstorm a list of things you would hear, see, touch and smell in a haunted house.  Carefully describe what the interior of the house was like, your reactions to it and what might happen next.

Then use the following topic sentence to start your paragraph:

Accepting the dare to enter the haunted house on Halloween night was not the wisest choice I had ever made, but I took a deep breath and pushed open the massive old door.

“Am I Proud of My Country”

Read below for a description of the Patriot’s Pen Essay contest then click on each of the student comments to read their essays.

Patriot’s Pen, a youth-essay writing contest endorsed by the National Association of Secondary School Principals’ contest criteria, is a nationwide competition that gives students in grades 6,7 and 8 the opportunity to write essays expressing their views on democracy. Annually, more than 115,000 students participate in the contest.

Contestants write a 300-400 word essay based on an annual patriotic theme. The first-place winner receives a $10,000 savings bond and an all-expense-paid trip to Washington D.C. The top national winners each receive a savings bond anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000. (Retrieved from: Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, http://www.vfw.org. Retrieved on: 28 – March – 2007.)

In this poem, students riffed the first line from Daybreak in Alabama by Langston Hugehes then wrote a poem about an issue they felt strongly about.  The poetic devices required for this poem were:  refrain, symbolism, language of identity, free verse, and imagery.