Day #3.22 - Monday, September 10th, 2012

 Meet Brianna Brown ... AND China Jones

It is now 5:50 p.m. on a Monday and the new AVID 9 scholar pictured above is still in my room working HARD on all her assignments.  Brianna is one of my first AVID 9 scholars to take advantage of the AVID Study Hall and I am super proud of her and feel blessed to have this assiduous young woman in my program.  One of our four AVID Houses will be lucky to gain her as a member....

Then to the right we have a picture of the infamous Chinah Jones - an AVID graduate from the class of 2011.  This awesome young woman is taking charge of her life, has always ACTED NOW, and has decided to make education her major!  I'm so proud of her and want nothing but the very best for this determined future elementary school teacher.

And to the right we have a picture of the new book I got in the mail today from Scholastic.  I can't WAIT to get my students to remember grammar rules for the SAT by connecting them to our superhero theme!  Here's some information from the website www.supergrammar.com

ABOUT: SUPER GRAMMAR

Super Grammar is a visual and engaging approach to teaching grammar using superheroes and supervillains.  These super characters will help everyone to better learn, understand, and remember the difficult subjects and concepts related to grammar.  

So--have no fear!  For even in the face of sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and comma splices, the superheroes within this book will always stand by your side as you fight your never ending battle between good and bad grammar.

For us, the best learning tools have always included these three things: word association, visual aids, and superpowers.  For this reason, we’ve taken all the major elements of grammar and have personified them with the identity of eithera superhero or supervillain and we’ve taken their functions and have transformed them into superpowers. 

So now, you won’t just learn about an ordinary part of speech called an adverb.  Instead, you’ll meet the vibrant superhero called The Adverb, and you’ll learn about her awesome ability to modify verbs and other adverbs.

Also, you won’t simply be told that you shouldn’t use a double negative in a sentence.  Instead, you will actually meet the sinister twin brothers that make up the supervillain team called Double Negative, and then you’ll learn why you shouldn’t let them trick you into falling for their double talk!

And the super format does not end there.  As we meet the characters in the book and learn about their powers, we’ll encounter example sentences to help us practice what we are learning.  But, we will never use run-of-the-mill textbook examples like, “Jane washed her hands before dinner.”

No!  We only use SUPER EXAMPLES like:

The masked hero rescued the crowd.