Agenda
1) Warmup
Write 10 sentences about Candy or Food. Each sentence should contain a simile, metaphor, or idiom.
2) Book club
3) Wearing a Raincoat
Homework
Choose a person to interview for your feature article. Write down their name and the danger they faced on a piece of paper and bring it to class on Monday.
Just a reminder that the definitions of simile, metaphor, and idiom are right here.
Wearing a Raincoat is a song by They Might Be Giants. As an exercise we listened to the song and read the lyrics, and then students decided the author's position on drugs. Each student then chose a quote from the lyrics that backed up their interpretation.
The goal was to reinforce the skill of backing up our interpretations with details and explanations from the text. The song, I believe, is about ambiguity, and about how nothing is all good or all bad. For example, even though we teach kids to avoid drugs, Aspirin is a drug, and we don't avoid that.
The song does not mention any specific drugs by name, so it is not clear if it is about medicinal drugs or recreational drugs. However it did provide a good opportunity to reinforce the dangers of drug abuse.
When a student chooses a person to interview for the feature article, there are two requirements:
1) The person must be an adult.
2) The person must have been in some kind of dangerous situation. The first choice is a person who had their house or place of work threatened by a brushfire, like the recent Sylmar fire. But I have students who interview people who experienced the Northridge earthquake, people who experiences hurricanes, one student's dad was on a plane that made an emergency landing. What matters is that the danger was real enough that it affected your behavior.
Most students will interview a family member, but this is not a requirement. Many students interview teachers.
