We will be doing a lot of our writing assignments on blogs this year. You will have to set up a blog. The following videos show you how to get started with your own blog.

If you happen to come to my web page before January 31 , you can set up your blog before the school year begins! I will be very impressed!

Edublogs tutorial

My video on how to get started.
Please note our school web site has changed so scroll down to academics and than go to my site which has also changed but the edublog links still work.

Write about a real or imagined day in your life in which you use color imagery to describe the setting and the events that happen, as the author did in the Prologue.

Imagery involves one or more of your five senses (hearing, taste, touch, smell, sight). An author uses a word or phrase to stimulate your memory of those senses. These memories can be positive or negative which will contribute to the mood.

Student Contest | Celebrate 2011 by Writing Raps About the Year’s News

You have just finished watching the film “Finding Forrester” . In the film , Jamal writes a story using the first paragraph of William Forrester’s short story. Your assignment is to use the first line or first paragraph from your favorite short story or novel and make it your own, just like Jamal.

Here is a website to help.

100 Most famous first lines of novels

Ballads are poems that tell a story. They are considered to be a form of narrative poetry. They are often used in songs and have a very musical quality to them.
The basic form for ballads is iambic heptameter (seven sets of unstressed, stressed sylables per line), in sets of four, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.(

• Emily Dickinson frequently used iambic heptameter, for example:

Because I could not stop for Death,

He kindly stopped for me;

The carriage held but just ourselves

And Immortality.

• The well-known hymn Amazing Grace is in iambic heptameter:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me

I one was lost but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see

This is the standard, but I do not require you to follow it rigidly in the poetry you submit to me, especially since very few people use or even know the standard! Feel free to experiment, but remember, it should have a smooth, song-like sound when you speak it aloud.
The Ballad

Ballads – Poems

Song Ballads

Thanksgiving is upon us and all of your relatives are going elsewhere for the holiday. You are allowed to invite ANY five figures you want to Thanksgiving dinner, but would they be a good mix?

Assignment:

1)   Decide on which five people you will invite to dinner and in a well-written paragraph explain why they will make the perfect Thanksgiving guest. Each guest must meet one of the following criteria:

1. A famous historic figure (dead)
2. A favorite author (living or dead)
3. An influential figure today (living)
4. A character from a favorite book
5. A good friend

2)   After justifying your guest list write a dialogue for the evening. You can just start with the dialogue; you do not need to set the story up.

3)   Explain if these guests would get along well or not. Would they end up throwing turkey at each other?

Assorted Rhyming Poems

Rhyme Dictionary

Haiku is a poetic form and a type of poetry from the Japanese culture. Haiku combines form, content, and language in a meaningful, yet compact form. Haiku poets, which you will soon be, write about everyday things. Many themes include nature, feelings, or experiences. Usually they use simple words and grammar. The most common form for Haiku is three short lines. The first line usually contains five (5) syllables, the second line seven (7) syllables, and the third line contains five (5) syllables. Haiku doesn’t rhyme. A Haiku must “paint” a mental image in the reader’s mind. This is the challenge of Haiku – to put the poem’s meaning and imagery in the reader’s mind in ONLY 17 syllables over just three (3) lines of poetry!
The falling flower
I saw drift back to the branch
was a butterfly.

Haiku Site
Tanka is the name of an ancient form of Japanese poetry.Tanka are 31-syllable poems that have been the most popular form of poetry in Japan for at least 1300 years. As a form of poetry, tanka is older than haiku, and tanka poems evoke a moment or mark an occasion with concision and musicality.
During Japan’s Heian period (794-1185 A.D.) it was considered essential for a woman or man of culture to be able to both compose beautiful poetry and to choose the most aesthetically pleasing and appropriate paper, ink, and symbolic attachment—such as a branch, a flower—to go with it.
Tanka were often composed as a kind of finale to every sort of occasion; no experience was quite complete until a tanka had been written about it.
Tanka have changed and evolved over the centuries, but the form of five syllabic units containing 31 syllables has remained the same.Topics have expanded from the traditional expressions of passion and heartache, and styles have changed to include modern language and even colloquialisms.
In Japanese, tanka is often written in one straight line, but in English and other languages, we usually divide the lines into the five syllabic units: 5-7-5-7-7.
Usually, each line consists of one image or idea; unlike English poetry, one does not seek to “wrap” lines in tanka, though in the best tanka the five lines often flow seamlessly into one thought.
English is very different from Japanese, and the first-time writer of English-language tanka may find that his or her tanka are more cumbersome and contain more images than we find in translated Japanese tanka. With practice, though, you will find the form strangely suitable to our relatively nonsyllabic language.
Many writers of English-language tanka use less than 31 syllables to achieve the form in English. American Tanka publishes tanka of five lines that are concise and evocative, are true to the purpose and spirit of tanka, and echo the original Japanese rhythm and structure.

Sample Tanka Poems

Scholastic is having a Haiku contest where you can win Dell Computers.

Check it out here.