ESSENTIAL QUESTION: Why is the writing process so necessary for clarity?
Learners used the entire period to begin drafting the essay on Anglo-Saxon ideals.
DUE: Essay on Anglo-Saxon Ideals - at the end of next class!
READ:
ESSENTIAL QUESTION: What role does language play in shaping (and erasing) identtity?
Learners discussed briefly the languages they spoke and how knowing another language (or not) shapes who they are.
They recalled their discussion of how setting influences character and extended that discussion to include "country," which also includes language!
We read together and discussed Rita Joe's "I Lost My Talk" and contrasted it with Atwood's "Disembarking at Quebec" from the lenses of a colonizer and settler and the colonized. We discussed truths that Joe presents and the promise of reconciliation from the speaker.
CONSIDER: What might reconciliation look like according to the vision in Rita Joe's poem?
NEXT CLASS: "The Destructors"
ESSENTIAL QUESTION: Why is it important to engage in the writing process?
Learners used the period to continue working on their outlines for the essay on Anglo-Saxon ideals.
NEXT CLASS: Writing!
ESSENTIAL QUESTION: Is "otherness" a thing? How is it important in literature?
Learners worked in cooperative groups to share their monologues from last class. Learners posed questions of each other with regard to how they believe they are seen by others.
We discussed the difference between a "selfie" and a "self-portrait." Learners identified that a selfie is quick, whereas a self-portrait required more thought and more "work.
We read together and appreciated Atwood's "This is A Photograph of Me." I asked learners to consider text features, especially the parenthesis in the poem and suggested that perhaps the poem, too, is both selfie and self-portrait.
PRACTISE: Post to the digital whiteboard
ESSENTIAL QUESTION: Why is it important to understand that as a sea-faring/fearing nation, England has a special relationship with the sea?
Learners shared their sea chanties. We discussed the importance of the sea as setting AND character in Anglo-Saxon texts.
Learners used the rest of the period to organize and prepare their notes for a literary essay on Angol-Saxon ideal in Beowulf. (Find the details of the essay in the Learning Opportunities section to the left.)
NEXT CLASS: The Essay
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS: What does the existence of pagan and Christian values tell us about the Anglo-Saxons? What is the value of poetry to remembering?
Learners offered their summaries and important lines from "The Burning of Beowulf's Body."
We looked together at the excerpt from Bede's The History of the English Church and Its People.
We discussed the oral language v. Bede's writing, and I suggested that features of oral language aid in memory. We listened to:
Learners worked in small groups to write their own sea chanties. They used a section of Beowulf for "the story."
READ: "The Seafarer"
NEXT CLASS: sea chanties, heroic epic v. elegiac epic
