Hiya!

Welcome to Mr. McCandless' English IV/Brit Lit Blog! I'm really excited to be teaching British Literature this year to seniors at Sage Hill School. The function of this blog will be to discuss ideas and issues related to British culture as well as the texts we are reading in class. Eventually the blog roll on the left-side of my blog will offer links to the blogs being written by the students in my class this year.

For our first blog entry, I have asked students to create a word cloud for one of the characters from the British novel they read this summer. For our summer reading assignment, I asked students to read one of four iconic British novels. They could choose from Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre or Frankenstein. The idea behind the word cloud assignment is for them to think about words that matter for the character they have chosen. These could be people, places, activities, values, goals, etc. None of the students chose to read Great Expectations (such a bummer!) so as an example, I've created a word cloud for Pip:

Pip's word cloud has "Joe" and "Estella" as the two biggest words because I feel as if these two characters are the most impactful on his life throughout the novel. I've noted several other important characters as well as London because the city is both the setting for much of the novel but also nearly a character in and of itself. Finally, I chose the words "homecoming', "metamorphosis" and "truth" as these are three major themes I see occurring in the novel.

I very much look forward to my students posting their own word clouds on their blogs!