Friday, October 11

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 8, and the semester is more than half over! The Read and Respond assignment (blog commenting) is available now. Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you forgot to do any of the assignments that were due on Thursday.

Class Procedures and Reminders:

Storybook Stack. I'm still working my way through the stack of Storybook assignments that people have turned in this week. My goal is to read and reply to everything turned in as of Thursday before the weekend! If you want to check to make sure your assignment is in the stack, you can see the contents of the stack here.

OU-Texas Weekend. (repeat announcement) Since you do not have anything that is specifically due today, there is no change to the schedule this week, and the Monday morning grace period will be available as usual. I would urge those of you who are going to the game this weekend (GO SOONERS!) to finish up your work before you go instead of hoping to do it when you get back.

Alternate Storybook Schedule. There are all kinds of reasons why people might miss a week for the Storybook, and it is not a problem. You can even miss two or three weeks and still end up with a total of three stories in your Storybook, which is just fine! For those of you going to the game who might not have time to finish your second story for Week 8, don't worry - you can turn in the second story for Week 9 (and the third story in Week 11 and a fourth story in Week 13). For more information about how the alternate schedules work, see this page: Storybook Schedule FAQ.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Featured Resource: Beware the Zombie Nouns! This resource page explains how to fight back against the zombie nouns that can suck the life right out of your writing while also making it feel awkward and sloooow. So, if you want your writing to be sharper and livelier, heed this advice: Beware the Zombie Nouns!

Featured Storybook: When Brothers Cross Paths. As the subtitle of Tracey's Myth-Folklore Storybook explains, this project is about "how the Winchesters meet the Brothers Grimm," and of course the result is just what you would expect: supernatural fairy tales!

FREE Kindle eBook: South-African Folk-Tales by James A. Honey. Here is a link to the book at Amazon, and this blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book. Those of you who read the African unit in Myth-Folklore this week will not be surprised to find a lot of jackal stories here!

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is A chain is only as strong as its weakest link (an English proverb). Details at the Proverb Lab. This is a good proverb for the team effort that the Red River Shootout will require on Saturday!

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is Sita's Trial by Fire. The sculpture is from the Tirumala Venkateswara Temple in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. You can see that Sita is under the protection of Agni the Fire God himself.

Red River Shootout. This famous football rivalry game even has its own page at Wikipedia, which is the source for the image below. You can look at the Wikipedia article for the full chart going all the way back to the year 1900. This millennium sure is looking pretty crimson!

Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed.