Practice makes ...

We continued to work on the idea of summarizing today--I returned last week's summaries today. Scores were low, but this is a new skill and I have pretty specific instructions for students to follow (and some didn't follow them). We'll practice the skill again today--I want students to annotate for main idea, underline supporting details, and then write their summary using their annotations. Students have worked on annotation for the entire year and some are still quite weak; now comes the rub, though, because weak annotations make for a weak summary. I've modeled annotating and I've modeled summary, so this is a process. Here's what we looked at and talked about last week (link). The 10 points I gave for last week's summary won't affect grades much--I used the score mainly to give kids feedback. 

Students also took a vocab quiz today and a quiz over Part I of Fahrenheit 451. The novel quiz grade will be in by tonight or early tomorrow morning. I'll also be gone to Kent ISD again tomorrow, working again on incorporating PBL (Project Based Learning) in my classes.