Semester Exams

Dear Students,

Preparing for a test based on today’s curriculum is not anything like preparing for a test when your parents were your age.  Today, it is more like preparing for an athletic event.  The skills you are learning and practicing in class every single day are habits of mind – critical reading and thinking, making inferences, and literary analysis. 

To prepare as an athlete, you must attend practice faithfully, participate fully, listen to your coaches, and keep your head in the game.  Preparing for a reading or writing test is no different.  If you have attended every practice and fully participated in your training, you will be prepared for your exams.  If you have missed too much practice, have not participated fully, or have not been focused on instruction, a review sheet will do you just about as much good as reading a guide on dribbling the night before a big soccer game. 

If you would like extra practice before the semester exams, try using the question stems I have provided to create your own questions based on the poems we have been studying. 

Have a great week, and a very Merry Christmas,

Ms. Poulter

December 9 - December 13

By the end of this week you should have the following in your Writer's Notebook - (not google, but your journal).  This will be an EASY major grade, so please make sure you have everything you need!

11/22 Four lines from a poem about poetry + what the author believes about poetry based on these lines
12/2   1 metaphor from "Introduction to Poetry" + explanation of why author makes this comparison
12/3   Your own "Litany"
12/4   A metaphor for any song lyric or poem + The metaphor in line _____ of the poem/song ________ is            used to ____________________________________________________________________.
12/6   Copy any poem from the poetry folder into your notebook and write about what you notice OR write           an imitation of this poem.
12/9   Your own Pantoum
12/11 A rhyming or syllabic poem

Be sure you also put your version of 13 Ways in Google Docs and share it with me.  This assignment will be a separate (minor) grade.

Poetry Question Stems

• How are ____ and ____ similar?
• Which line from the poem best expresses ___?
• The metaphor in line ____ is used to ____
• The poet uses a simile in line ___ to ___
• Dividing the poem into stanzas allows the poet to ___
• The ___ is important to the poem because it represents ___
• The poet likely intends for the last two lines to ____
• Based on stanza ____ the reader can conclude ____
• Which lines from the poems express a lesson that the speaker learns?
• In the poem, the speaker's mood changes from ___ to ___
• Both the author of ____ and the speaker in the poem would most likely agree that ___
• Read the lines from the poem- Which sentence from the passage express the same idea as the lines from the poem?

After reading the similes below, complete the unfinished ones.  Try for something unexpected.

The baled wheat scattered
everywhere like missing coffins
                                                     ~Carolyn Forche

Loneliness spreading
fast like a gas fire
                                     ~Frances Mayes

A gull is locked like a ghost in the blue attic of heaven
                                                                       ~Charles Wright

tired as....
hot as....
waves unfurled like...
after the shelling, the town looked as if...
disgusting as...
the child trembled like...
the airplane rose like a...
black as...
he entered the room like...

Now write three negative similes

It wasn't like...