Jeremy Dericks 12/20

Today in class we did two activities, both having to do with critical reviews.  We have been focusing on the key components of critical reviews for the past couple days, in order to prepare us to write our own.  The first activity we did was a continuation from what we started in class yesterday.  Yesterday we took each of the one paragraph reviews that each group made and we put them in chronological order based on the content and structure.  The one paragraph reviews that were wrote were reviews of the short film "Feast," was was created to play in theaters before showings of "Big Hero 6."  Today, we used the paragraphs in the order that we designated to practice using transitions.  Each group was instructed to take the topic sentence of the paragraph that they wrote, and insert a transition that effectively links their paragraph to the one preceding it.  After we finished that Mr. River's compared each groups old sentence to the new and improved one and provided both positive and negative feedback just like he always does to ensure that everyone understands what to do.  The next activity had to do with topic and theme.  We took the lists of topics from "Feast" that we made last week, picked a topic, and turned that topic into a theme.  Mr. River's explained to us that a theme is something that is not answered in the text directly, but is something that can still be explained with the use of evidence.  Some groups had trouble at first but after Mr. River's gave us some examples everyone started to get the hang of it.