11/28/07 8th grade 1st draft

We started our day by talking about glossaries. A glossary is a section in the back of a book (often a textbook) that gives the meanings of difficult words used in the book. We will create our own personal glossaries based on the difficult words we find in our daily reading. One of your ongoing assignments is to put a new word in your glossary every time we have reading time in class. Please devote a section of your language arts notebook to your glossary. You will need to include the following in each glossary entry:

• a word you are unfamiliar with
• the book and page number you found the word
• what you think the word means
• an original sentence that shows you know what the word means.

Often times, we can figure out what a words means based on the clues given in the surrounding sentences. You are to guess the meaning of the word based on these clues given in the context of the book. This is a very important skill to develop. I will be checking glossaries from time to time, and you will be graded on having one complete entry for every time we have silent reading in class.

We also worked on our first draft of the comparison/contrast essay about the first Thanksgiving and our own Thanksgiving. A first draft should be written quickly, and should focus on organizing the ideas we gather in our prewrite. Your assignment for tomorrow is to write a first draft based on the following organization:

Introduction (1 paragraph)

• grabs attention of reader
• introduces main topic
• introduces three sub-topics
• 5 sentences

Body (3 paragraphs)

• each paragraph focuses on one sub-topic
• 5-7 sentences per paragraph

Conclusion (1 paragraph)

• summarizes paper
• restates topic and sub-topics
• closure
• 5 sentences

Tomorrow we will be working on revising and editing our first drafts. Make sure you have your first draft ready for class tomorrow.