Senior Learners Class Notes

   Senior Learners

     We are busy at work on several endeavors. We began acquainting ourselves with the building blocks of a sentence by exploring the vocabulary of sentences including, fragments, clauses, conjunctions, and dependent and independent clauses. The goal of becoming more fluent with concepts of the grammar of a sentence is to write sentences capable of complexity and thought. Our work in this area will be ongoing. 

     As comedians, the senior learners completed a short script for a slapstick comedy that we will film sometime before the break. Additionally, we began considering Steve Martin's advice to emerging comedians in his Master Class on comedy. So far, his advice has produced a couple of funny bits that will find a forum for a performance sometime in the future. 

     This January, we are participating in Guild Hall's Student Art Festival. Their theme is "Past, Present, and Future," and we are taking up the future by reading stories from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles as a way into thinking about imagining the future through the lens of the genre of science fiction. In light of our school calendar, our work for the show will need to be completed before the Thanksgiving break, and so we'll need to roll up our sleeves and focus almost exclusively on this project. I'll keep you posted on our progress. 

     The kids continue reading independently and enjoy our read-aloud of Echo Mountain, which remains captivating to all. 

     Lastly, the senior learners are revising their movie reviews. They put much thought into how to construct a thoughtful review, and like all good writers, are discovering that a first draft is just the beginning of a good piece of writing. 

     We had fun at our after-school pump-track party, and we'll plan another after-school event before the break.