This week the students were introduced to The Last Readers, an interactive graphic novel that focuses on close reading skills. Throughout the adventure, students are introduced to and practice concepts that encourage a deeper interaction with texts. These include word choice, sentence and narrative structure, point of view, argument and figurative language. The topic for this week was arguments and their structure. In order to broadcast a message of hope to their fellow citizens in the Dome, students had to learn about the relationships between claims, evidence and reasons in an argument. They used these categories to identify parts of an argument, evaluated the quality of arguments and began making their own.

We also continued to work on our production of The Little Prince. The students were challenged to perform their first run on Friday morning. The shortened time frame was by design. Throughout the sessions, students created props and shared observations about things that needed to be considered while they worked. These included the need for a way of sharing and knowing what each student was working on, the absence of a script, and the importance of scale and perspective. While we could have discussed all of these directly prior to beginning, this approach encouraged greater engagement and student self-direction.