Play Journals

Below I am including the instructions you received yesterday on a green sheet about your nightly posting. Post #2 needs to be done today based on what we read in class.

November and December

Pre-IB Sophomore English

Reader Response Journals

Objectives:

1. Students will learn to trust their own responses to literature.

2. Students will look critically at the plays both to understand it better and to analyze its subtleties

Overview.

You will be recording your reactions to the assigned reading. Your entries should be unique, personal descriptions of the effect the reading is having on you. In these responses you can admit your confusion, expand on the author’s ideas, and attept to discover your own.

General Guidelines:

1. As a rule, you will have one journal entry due every night. You will write your journals on your blog. Any exceptions to this will be noted in class.

2. You will also be making one comment on someone else’s blog each night you have a journal entry due. Your comments should be constructive, not destructive, and genuinely contribute to a literary conversation. “Good idea” is not a sufficient contribution. You will copy and paste your comment onto the bottom of the blog entry you created that same day.

Suggested Writing Starters:

1. Acknowledge your first impressions. Immediately after reading, take some time to think about anything that comes to you in relations to the text. If you’re intrigued by certain statements or attracted to a particular character’s issues, work with those.

2. Ask questions about the text. What perplexes you? Do you wonder why the author made a certain decision with the text?

3. Make connections with your own experiences and with other texts, concepts, or events.

4. Speculate about images, details, and lines that strike you for whatever reason. Why are they there? What do they add? Why are they memorable? Do they have anything in common? Can you make an assertion about them?

5. Copy passages, long or short, that strike you. Underline key words or phrases. What is striking and why? How do the words and images work? What doe it tell us about character, theme, atmosphere, or narration.

6. Write down words you do not know or find particularly effective.

7. Try agreeing with the author; add details to support his or her ideas. Try arguing with the author; where do you disagree. Choose details to support your points.

8. Identify the author’s attitude toward the subject, the purpose behind the piece of writing.

9. Notice repetition and muse about why it is used and what the effect is.

10. You can get creative. Change something about the story and see what the effect is. Write an additional scene.

11. Don’t neglect literary elements and techniques like imagery, theme, character, diction, punctuation, etc.

Suggested Starters:

1. I began to think of

2. I noticed that

3. This reminds me of

4. I realized

5. I’m not sure

6. I was surprised

7. I can’t believe

8. I can’t really understand

9. If I were

10. I wonder why

11. I know the feeling

12. Although