Jared was absent for almost the entire period, so I gave him a vocabulary writing assignment and a poetry reading assignment.

We read a James Thurber story to check Jared's understanding of what it means to thicken a plot.

Jared reviewed a variety of styles of language usage, and then discussed when each might be appropriate to use. We also reviewed the Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Martin Luther King as an example of metaphorical language.

We reviewed a number of vocabulary words and then began a discussion of Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech.

We looked at Frost's poems to see what he thought of contemporary life.

We reviewed Jared's writing assignment, and then progressed into looking at gradational styles of writing.

We focused on imagery and metaphor today as expressed through Faulkner and other Southern regional writers.

As Jared came late, we spent most of the time presenting both familiar and unfamiliar prefixes, and then had a brief discussion of Thomas Wolfe's surrealistic writing.

The girls had read "A Rose for Emily" by Faulkner, so I brought a DVD for them to watch the movie based on the story in order for them to see examples of the era, the social ideologies of the time, and the use of symbols throughout the story.

The girls and I discussed the story "Everyday Use" and its elements we could use to create an essay. We then read through a student essay from the book in order to note structure and organization and rhetoric. This way they could grasp the concept of rhetorical patterns to form an argument as we do in writing about literature.