The sniffles and ick that are going around the school seemed to hit the students in Comm Arts pretty hard this week. Nonetheless, we got some very interesting work done.
We spent the beginning of the week working on vocabulary to help us make distinctions between reality and fantasy, fact and opinion, and the new concepts of the week: the denotation and connotation of words and ideas. Archaic, apt, deja vu, distortion, literal, prominent and the like found their way into some entertaining sentences as students practiced their vocabulary in class.
We ended the week by reading a selection from Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" and practicing reading for connation to help us get underneath the literal images writers use to speak for their larger ideas.
We will continue with this exercise as we move into working with similes, metaphors and extended metaphors. I already see the perceptions the students have into their reading improving!
