September 4, 2013: What's Happening in English 10?

Focus: How can we use our reading strategies to understand complex visual texts such as commercials and film?

1. Warm-up: Playing a round or two of Scattegories to understand and review the List 1 SAT words

2. Watching a long commercial and a short commercial; unraveling their layers

Reading Strategy #1: Find the clues/little details that seem significant
With commercials, this becomes much more complex.  Consider the following:

Colors

Images

Music

Characters

Background/scene

Camera angles, cuts, close-ups, etc. 

Narration (words spoken aloud)

Text (words that appear on screen)

Reading Strategy #2: Make the unfamiliar familiar (make inferences)

Reading Strategy #3: Ask great questions

Reading Strategy #4: Build up and activate your background knowledge

What do you know about the subject of this commercial that helps you understand it?

What do you need to look up?

Use these strategies to make a statement about this commercial's bigger picture, or larger purpose:

This commercial is trying to...by...

3. Applying these strategies to the best film clip ever

HW:
1. Finish your List 1 vocabulary flashcards by tomorrow; bring them to class tomorrow and start studying them for Friday's List 1 vocabulary quiz.

2. Look over everything we've done in the past two weeks (blogs, notes, reading strategies, texts, homework, etc) to prepare yourself for tomorrow's reading boot camp post-test.

3. Bring your independent reading book to class on Friday.