Tip: if you are struggling with the whole asking a question thing, try to identify the main idea of the paragraph (see notes below for more in main ideas). You can use this subject to create a question.
Tip: use a highlighter to mark the vocab words and confusing sections. That way, these things will visually "pop" and it will be much easier to locate when you need to look words up.
Tip: write your questions down right on the text you are reading. Use post-it notes if you HATE writing in your book. If you keep your notes on the reading, it is much easier to keep up with actually writing all the questions down.
*To test your progress and growing comfort with annotation, read "Johnson and the War" from Reading for Thinking page 630-631.
We also continued working on paragraphs and paragraph organization:
An Olympic champion has five distinctive characteristics.
The blue part is the main topic of this sentence. It is what the sentence is about. If this sentence was used as a topic sentence to control the flow and organization of a paragraph, readers would know right away that the whole paragraph would be focused on and Olympic champion.
The red part is the main point the writer wants to communicate. Again, if this were used as a topic sentence of a paragraph, the rest of the paragraph would have to explain more about these five distinctive characteristics.
An Olympic champion has five distinctive characteristics. The first, and maybe the most important, characteristic is commitment. Commitment will help the athlete stick with a tough training schedule even if it seems daunting. Optimism is also a key trait and will likely play out in more than one area of the champion's life. For example, optimism will help the athlete stay confident during both a hard workout as well when life outside of sports starts to become challenging. Pefectionism is another big trait. While it may annoy those around them, the Olympic champion knows that only perfecting his or her skills will be good enough, and that champion will work continuously to achieve the highest level. Perhaps this is aided by the fourth trait, the ability to focus. Finally, the fifth characteristic is being mentally tough. In other words, the Olympic champion has the ability to ignore all the mind games and just concentrate on what matters--the game!
If you look above at the paragraph, you can see something pretty cool...each of the sentences that follow the topic sentence, actually follow the topic sentence! What I mean by this is that the topic sentence set up the structure for the rest of the paragraph. It set up a blue print, and the writer just had to follow that blue print in order to build a strong paragraph!
...and finally for today: Google
1) remember to choose a strong, searchable term for your investigation. If you wrote the first draft on Wednesday, you should have a searchable topic identified already. If you missed class on Wednesday, choose a topic you are curious about.
2). plug your topic into Google and spend some time looking around at the sites that come up. Refer back to page 33ish in Reading for Thinking if you want a review.
3) choose just one site and use that to fill out the Internet Search part of your Investigation sheet.
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