Dear AP Lang Teacher (Week 6)

Week 5 was ambitious, like I said. Tone. Tonal shift. Diction. Imagery. Syntax. AND Rhetorical Appeals. The kids, however, followed along like champs. In particular, they were ALL about the Diction Dress-up paper dolls. It was one of those risky lessons that outshone my expectations.
​It’s a highly recommend if you want to talk about tone and diction. :) I will warn you, though, that cutting out the doll was a much more daunting task than I thought. Ha ha.

week 6

Now we are on the downswing of our Critical Reading unit. (About time… we are on Week 6 after all). Therefore, I am going to spend the week walking kids through how these different concepts tie in to AP: Annotation and SOAPSTone analysis. Now that I think they have some of the core concepts down, we are ready to start analyzing text for multiple choice. ​

Part of Teaching Sincerely is being adaptable so that the kids get what they need. Nowhere is this more important than the AP classroom (...in my biased opinion). Kids need feedback, and they need it often, but anyone with more than one section of AP knows how impossible that feels.

This summer, I posted a blog series about how I keep feedback manageable. (It starts here). One of the strategies that I shared - collaborative writing - is coming into play this week. Students will do collaborative annotation and a collaborative SOAPSTone. By using the methodology I share in this free resource, I am able to make sure that all kids are practicing the skill with fidelity while simultaneously limiting the number of submissions. This, in turn, means I can give them lots of feedback before their test next week.

Collaborative writing is a big go-to in my room. Try it out and see how it changes your practice!
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Lesson Plans