I love to see the students act out scenes from our novels. Here is a scene from Tom Sawyer chapter one where Tom meets up with the new kid in town. Two thumbs way up for our actors.

During our writing this week we are practicing FANBOYS sentences. These are compound sentences that have a coordinating conjunctions preceded by a comma. As we write, we highlight those sentences to practice our grammar and punctuation skills.

We are visually sharing our data of references through collages. After all student paste their references, we will be able as a large group develop our own understanding of the concepts and reference them as we read further into the novel.

This week we are exploring references in other literary genres of some of the themes and characters to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. So far, we've found several song lyrics, other books, and even newspaper articles. 

Remember circle time? We still enjoy it here in 8th grade, as you can see the class gives it a thumbs up! This is where we share our writing, discuss literature, and have class meetings.

Hooray! It rained today! As we were writing our Mark Twain tweets, we heard the clap of thunder. We could hardly believe our ears, so we went outside to investigate.

After 3 weeks of independent reading AR top genres read are romance and fantasy. Most of these were our "thumbs down" genres, but many of discovered we loved our thumbs down choice (though some have said they are ready to definitely change genres) and are continuing to read more.