Welcome to our class blog

Dear 8G Students and Parents,

Welcome to our class blog. This is a good place to find announcements and materials. Right now,  I do not have all the emails of students or parents, so I will distribute this blog address to the 8G students tomorrow along with a study guide for the first midterm exam. In the future, feel free to come here to download lesson plans or materials.

The first midterm exam will happen on Thursday, 10/12 at 14:50. I believe it is in our usual classroom, and I will be the person giving, or proctoring, the exam. The test lasts for 70 minutes. Students should use the restroom before the exam begins. Although the time for the exam should be finished around 16:00, if we start on time, the period finishes at 16:20, in case we are a few minutes late in starting. There is no break during the exam.

Here is some information about the exam. There is a dictation section with 10 words. All questions, not including the writing, are worth 2 points each. There are 41 questions in total, and the 41st question is a writing question. For the writing question, students will have a choice of two essays, but they must choose only one of them to write. They both are similar to the questions we have practiced before for writing homework. The writing section is worth 20 points.

There are Reading Comprehension Questions on our three reading selections, "Riding Freedom," "Early Inventions," and "Five New Words."  There are 12 of these questions and you will need to remember the story, as you will not see any of them during the exam.

The next part is Vocabulary, and just like the last section, these are multiple choice questions. There are 10 of these questions, and you need to remember the academic vocabulary too. Use the schedule you were given that lists all of the vocabulary and know all of the words.

The next section is about Grammar, and there are 8 questions on these topics: past tense, gerunds, and sequence of adjectives. The multiple choice questions are distributed evenly, so that means one of those subjects has two questions and the others have three questions each.

For the writing, I suggest you look at the writing homework you have done and review it. Especially look at the feedback I have given you. I will try to find you on Wednesday to give you the study guide, but just to let you know, my schedule on Wednesday is full in the morning with classes and free in the afternoon.

Good luck on your exam in this class and your other classes! Class G is a pleasure to teach, and I believe we can accomplish a lot this year together.

Teacher Rob Catlin