Unit Task

Examples of travel writing

These are some examples of the types of travel writing from our menu.

Personal Essays:
Where the Roads Diverged by Catherine Watson
Why We Travel by Pico Iyer

Restaurant Reviews:
Restaurant Reviews by Gourmet Traveller

Hotel Reviews:
A Killer Vacation by James Parker
Delano Hotel in Miami by Oyster Reviews

Social Commentary:
An Unkindness of Ravensby Imagine That
Small Streets by Imagine That
Why Travel Doesn’t Fix Everything by Legalnomads

Destination Essay
Uruguay is a Land of Contrasts by Brian Kevin

Read the examples of your chosen text type and cross-reference against the task specific clarifications of each text type.

Your assignment is to spend some time during the Chinese New Year break to experience local or overseas travel, take notes, and draft your chosen text type.
You can experience the following without having to spend a lot of money:

  • Go to a restaurant and eat there
  • Recall a hotel you stayed in recently
  • Recall a trip (you can even use our Weeks without walls – Dali and Luang Prabang)

Whatever content you choose, it may be used to develop an effective written piece that shows global interactions, audience imperative and intertextuality. It must also give a sense of place and time.
Criteria and task specific clarifications are on Managebac under the task “Travel Writing Long Piece.”

Here is the link to the Rubric. Here is the link to the Task Specific Clarifications.

Let your Year of the Horse begin with positivity and energy!

Getting Started with Critical Perspectives

for TR16E
Concordian’s Class of 2016

This week, the incoming Year 5 will receive their Summer Reading Assignment.

Things to Do

To support you in this assignment, sign up as a follower of this blog by typing in your email into the space provided in the bar on the right hand side of the blog front page.

The blog will be used to post ways that you can approach your learning, present you with materials that help you think, and other unit-specific information and tasks.

Also, head on over to our Facebook page Lit Up which is a space where you can discuss topics in language and literature studies in MYP Language A. This is where we can ‘meet up’ and talk about all things literature. We can also share resources with the group.

The blog is for students of MYP Language A Year 5 only. The FB page is a social page where you might meet other class students and teachers who like literature and discussions about literature.

Critical Perspectives Investigation

Before you read your summer text, investigate into critical perspectives in literature. You can start with this online introduction from Purdue’s OWL.

If you come across more resources as you investigate WHAT critical perspectives are and HOW they shape our reading of literature, share these resources on our Facebook page where we can discuss them, and as a comment to this post so the class has a shared list of sources.

Welcome, Class of 2016. May our journey together be meaningful.

Memories, Facebook, and the concept of Time, Place and Space

In the introduction to our new unit, we also viewed a Youtube video about Facebook being the new record of memories. Gone are the scrapbooks, large photo albums and letters of old for sharing and documenting our lives. Instead, we share on a mostly public wall these artifacts that make up our identities and development.

To inquire into our continuing development, we will begin with a look at how Facebook demonstrates the intersections of time, place and space in the artifacts that people share, in the language they use indicating relationships, and in the ways in which people’s Facebook profiles may or may not be the same personas they are in their physical and materials (not virtual) lives.

Our task is to develop a Facebook page of a fictional person who has gone through stages of development according to a theorist of your choice. This assignment is due March 13th and can be submitted through the Managebac dropbox, or via email to Dr Fish.

Have fun with this task!

The Facebook Observation

How do people change when the setting changes?

Our task for the next three nights is to spend a TOTAL of 30 minutes on Facebook to observe the following:

  • How do people show their levels of intimacy through the language of their posts or conversations on FB?
  • How do people show emotion on FB?
  • Observe one person and make conclusions about them through the: photos they post, the status posts they wrote and other information they share.

Make some conclusions on whether Facebook is a place that changes identity and bring your conclusions to class for a round table discussion on Tuesday March 12.

Please also post your inquiry question as a comment to this post.

Deconstructing point of view

Our task today is to examine two texts.

Text A is a blog.
Text B is a feature article in an online news publication.

To what extent does the point of view shift the way a text is written? Use your notes on text vs. author’s context to help you address this question.

Please send the work in by submitting to the Managebac Dropbox for this task, before 8.00 pm Feb 9.

Happy Chinese New Year, F15H!

Concept Mapping

Our task for the next few days is to develop a concept map.

Choose one of the unit concepts from our current unit (aesthetics, form, truth) or the inquiry this week (creativity, flow and creative process) and create a concept map. Criteria addressed will be Content – how well you unpack and connect the concept to previous learning and literature, and Organization – how well you show relationships between ideas through the concept map.

Here is one example of a concept map. The source website has some how-to information.

http://www.mindtools.com/

An example of a concept map.

Create your concept map and share it with us visually on January 15th.

The Romantic Period as context for Frankenstein

View the presentation slides embedded in this post and ponder the ideas that formed the period known as the Romantic Period.

  • What ideas surrounded this historical time?
  • How might these ideas influence the writers who created their works at this time?

Write some questions that arose from your thinking about the ideas as part of the environment, which gave context for texts created during the Romantic Period.

Post your questions as comments to this post.