Day 22: Conclusions

Short List

1. Attendance Check and Warm-up
2. Review from Friday
3. Introduction to Thesis Statements
4. Testing Out What You Think Know About Thesis Statements
5. Review of the "Rules" of Thesis Statements
6. Returning Paragraph Portfolios and Midterm Grade Reports

Homework:By Friday, write a 300-word self-reflective paragraph/essay responding to one of these prompts. Please do not rush through it, but take your time to write something thoughtful to help yourself grow in your writing and learning:

• How you have seen areas needing improvement that you did not previously know you had. 
• How you have seen specifically seen yourself grow as a writer in ESL 111. 
• The most useful assignment/project/lesson/activity to you personally and why it was so useful. 
• A review of the goals you set at the beginning of the semester and your progress on meeting them--both your successes and failures. 
• The most important thing to know about ESL 111 and academic writing and why it is the most important. 
• Advice you would give a new student about to come to the U.S. for the first time from your country who is going to take my section of ESL 111. 

Please leave these in your Google Drive folder and name them anything you like so long as the word "Reflection" is somewhere in the title.

Looking ahead: Your essay is due, next Friday, 24 October.  I would start thinking ahead on this so that your weekend and next week won't be as full.  Here's a guide (the required dates are in red): 

• Friday, 17 October -- Rough draft of introduction and conclusion, outline of body paragraphs
• Monday, 20 October -- Rough draft of the entire essay 
• Monday, 20 October -- Rough draft of introduction and conclusion, outline of body paragraphs

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The Details
Schedule of events:

1. [5 minutes] Attendance Check and Discussion of the Essay

2. [20 minutes] Review of What We Know
Do we even know enough about essay writing to successfully fulfill this assignment?  I think so.  I especially think that we do if we combine all of our knowledge.  In four groups based on your special area of "expertise" write a short lesson or instruction that will teach your reader(s) about one of the following things:

Group 1	Group 2	Group 3	Group 4
Teach us everything you know about this specific assignment (think: what kind of essay am I writing?) the structure or outline that you would need to have	Teach us everything you know about body paragraphs.	Teach us everything you know about introduction paragraphs.	Teach us everything you know about thesis statements.

When you have finished writing your "lesson" each group will take a minute or two to "teach" their material to the rest of the class.  All of the other students can feel free to ask your group any questions--be prepared.

*Feel free to use any materials available to your group to make this as detailed as possible.  You can use anything on the course website, anything that you know from personal knowledge, and anything you can find on the Internet (just be sure to give credit where credit is due--cite your sources!).

3. [10 minutes] Conclusions
We know a lot, right?

What about an essay have we not talked about?

So, to learn about them, let's look at one and try to figure out the purpose of the different parts.  We are going to try and reverse engineer one.  You can do this either independently or with the help of your groupmates.

4. [10 minutes] Can You Guess Their Purpose and/or Order? 
As you know, there is a specific order of the parts of an introduction paragraph.  It looks like that now famous upside down triangle.  There are specific parts in a conclusion and a specific order.  Can you figure it out?

Group "Quiz"
Again, you can do this individually or as a group.  The choice is yours.  


5. [5 minutes] The Rules of Conclusions
Now, can you describe here what you think conclusions should have?

I can. :) You'll find it on the Lino It board.

Homework:

By Friday, write a 300-word self-reflective paragraph/essay responding to one of these prompts. Please do not rush through it, but take your time to write something thoughtful to help yourself grow in your writing and learning:

• How you have seen areas needing improvement that you did not previously know you had. 
• How you have seen specifically seen yourself grow as a writer in ESL 111. 
• The most useful assignment/project/lesson/activity to you personally and why it was so useful. 
• A review of the goals you set at the beginning of the semester and your progress on meeting them--both your successes and failures. 
• The most important thing to know about ESL 111 and academic writing and why it is the most important. 
• Advice you would give a new student about to come to the U.S. for the first time from your country who is going to take my section of ESL 111. 

Please leave these in your Google Drive folder and name them anything you like so long as the word "Reflection" is somewhere in the title.

Looking ahead: Your essay is due, next Friday, 24 October.  I would start thinking ahead on this so that your weekend and next week won't be as full.  Here's a guide (the required dates are in red): 

• Friday, 17 October -- Rough draft of introduction and conclusion, outline of body paragraphs
• Monday, 20 October -- Rough draft of the entire essay 
• Monday, 20 October -- Rough draft of introduction and conclusion, outline of body paragraphs

Attribution: The majority of this lesson was designed by me, but I used Jeff Arrigo's materials in sections 3 - 5 and loosely followed his plan for their implementation in sections 3 - 4.