Here is some information you may want to preview about the Historic Arkansas Museum:
Due Thursday, April 25, 2008
Tuesday (April 22) is Earth Day! This is a special day when we celebrate the earth and learn how to take care of it.
The teacher will give you a page with ten or eleven facts about the Earth. Each student will have different facts. You can read the whole article here: 101 Amazing Earth Facts.
Read and learn your facts. If you need help, use a dictionary, talk to your friends, or visit the teacher during office hours.
In class Thursday, there will be a quiz. Some questions will come from your reading page, others will come from other students’ pages. You can help each other on the quiz! But if you don’t know the information on your page, the other students might get that question wrong, too. This is TEAMWORK.
North American Longtail Weasel (from U.S. National Park Service)
For this assignment we will be reading an essay, “Living Like Weasels” by Annie Dillard from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. You may answer these questions on your own paper.
Vocabulary to discuss in class
Vocabulary to get from context
For each of the above words, please
Reading comprehension
1.
..Once, a man shot an eagle out of the sky. He examined the eagle and found the dry skull of a weasel fixed by the jaws to his throat. The supposition is that the eagle had pounced on the weasel and the weasel swiveled and bit as instinct taught him, tooth to neck, and nearly won. I would like to have seen that eagle from the air a few weeks or months before he was shot: was the whole weasel still attached to his feathered throat, a fur pendant?
What has happened in this quote? Be prepared to demonstrate the scene in class.
2. In paragraph 6, what is the author sitting on? (give a description, not just a word)
3. “Our eyes locked, and someone threw away the key.”
This sentence in paragraph 9 uses figurative language. What does it mean, literally?
4. In paragraphs 10, 11 and 12, the author uses a lot of metaphor and descriptive language to describe how she felt in this special situation with the weasel. It is okay if you don’t understand all of it. Just try to explain, in a sentence or two, what Annie Dillard feels was so wonderful and unusual about her meeting with the weasel.
5. In the last paragraph, the author uses an image from the second paragraph to make her main point. What quality or belief does she think is important for people to have?
BBC animated guide: Tornadoes
HowStuffWorks video: How Tornadoes Work
“Reported speech” is when Person A says something and Person B tells Person C the thing Person A said.
A: “The winter weather is horrible in Chicago.”
B to C: “She said the winter weather was horrible in Chicago.”
For a very thorough list of rules and examples of reported speech, check out
Professor Rick Shur’s handout page
Scroll down to Grammar & Vocabulary Information & Exercises and choose Reported Speech Rules. This will allow you to download the .doc handout. You can also find practice exercises and answers there.
Due 9/29/2006
You will be listening to “A Duty to Family, Heritage and Country” by Ying Ying Yu .
This is an essay she wrote for a class assignment. It was broadcast on NPR’s “This I Believe” segment on Morning Edition, July 17, 2006.
1. In your own words, what is this story about?
2. What does Ying Ying Yu believe?
3. What did Ying Ying first want to do when she grew up?
4. What is her plan, now?
5. At first, Ying Ying had a hard time “opening up” her feelings to write this essay. What made it easier?
6. Write about your personal thoughts on this topic. Do you think your country and culture have affected your life goals?
The Wiki site is temporarily down, but I will move this to the appropriate place there when it’s back up.
Study Guide for Insights 1 Unit 4
p. 142 Modals to express possibility
p. 143 family tree vocabulary
p. 161 Clarification connectors
p. 165 Latin and Greek roots
p. 175 Subordinators
Also be prepared to answer an essay question about any of the major topics we discussed in class: views of family, definitions of marriage, ways of recognizing marriage, adoption, and cousin couples.
