Happy New Year!  I see many of you have posted your short stories and provided thoughtful replies to each other.  The quality of story-telling is quite remarkable, especially given that there is very little in our curriculum allowing for creative writing.  I suggest that you return to our Writeon web site to review comments made about your writing and respond in turn.

For those who have not yet posted, your assignment is past due.

Enjoy your holiday.

Sincerely,

Mr. Coey

Well done creating Wordle images and commenting on at least two of your classmate’s poems.  If you have not yet commented, please do that first.  Also, go back to your poem and view what others have written and respond to them where it is appropriate.

I’ll admit that I had trouble uploading our Flickr images to a digital book, so that is still a work in progress.  The good news is that we have a class gmail account and Flickr account. Here is the information:

2013iesib@gmail.com    password: thundergodz (I added the “z” so it matches our Flickr account. 

http://www.flickr.com/  at the top you will see the “sign in” button; use your gmail username and password to access our photos.  Once you see our photostream,  you can upload photos and create “sets” of photos. So far I have created two sets (Victor’s photos and Coey’s photos).  Please upload your photos.

For those of you who attended the Yosemite Field Trip, I would like you to write a brief autobiographical incident (describe an important moment of self discovery and awareness).  Write about one experience and describe your observations, thoughts, and feelings.  Compare your experience using figurative language and personification. 

For those of you who remained in Sacramento,  I want you to review our field trip photos on Flickr, select one image to write about, and write yourself into one of the settings.  Imagine your thoughts, feelings, and observations, and create a fictional autobiography.  Compare your fictional experience by using figurative language and personification.

If you still have time, create a Bubblr image like the one I created using an image of the Yosemite Valley http://www.pimpampum.net/bubblr/?id=29935 

Be sure to read John Muir’s “Sierra Thunderstorms” for an excellent example of figurative language and personification. Pay close attention to the “Journey of the Raindrop” on the second page.  It’s very cool.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: …

We write to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable and love possible. And I can elaborate on those things.

But the most important is love. That after all the suffering, all the injustice, all the evil that one sees in the world, if you can rise above it and make it beautiful, and thus lovable then that’s worth a life.