Freshmen

Welcome to a new school year. It will be a busy year beginning with a review of Grammar: the 8 parts of speech, phrases, clauses, direct objects, indirect objects, predicate nouns, predicate adjectives, gerunds, participles and infinitives, diagram sentences and conjugate verbs. We will be reading both fiction and nonfiction stories as well as poetry by such authors as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Maya Angelou, Edgar Allen Poe, Lady Bird Johnson, James Thurber, Ernest Hemingway, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Ray Bradbury, Patrick Henry, Sally Ride, Carl Sandburg, and poetry by Emily Dickinson, Lewis Carroll, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Robert Frost, and Shakespeare. We will be reading novel studies along with our daily assignments. Your goal will be to earn 25 AR points every 9 weeks.

You will need a notebook in which to keep notes on literary terms, authors' backgrounds and a red pen. We will learn how to write your essays in an MLA format, with in-text citing and a reference page. There is an example of this in the File Cabinet. I look forward to seeing you in the fall and having a great year of reading, writing and discussions. There is a list of books for summer reading in the filing cabinet. I hope you will continue to read this summer!