Friday, February 6

HAPPY FRIDAY! You have reached the end of Week 4! Friday morning, until noon, is the grace period if you did not finish Thursday's work, and the blog commenting assignment for this week is available now — and if you missed them, here's a link to Thursday's announcements.

Class Procedures and Reminders

Project Stack. I'm still making my way through the stack of assignments: if you turned in your Storybook Topics on Sunday, you should have gotten comments back from me already, and my goal for today is to return comments for everything that was turned in between Monday and Friday. You can check the stack to make sure I received your assignment! If something comes in today, it will go to the top of the stack for Monday.

Week 4 Blog Comments. The blog commenting assignment is now available, with new random groups! There is also an extra credit responding option if you want to read and comment on some Reading Diary posts.

The following items are for fun and exploration:

Writing Tip: Fiction Writing Conflict Test. Here's a great tool from Amanda Patterson for making sure you have some good conflict going on in your story: The 12 Question Fiction Writing Conflict Test.

Indian Words in English: Today's Indian word in English is CANDY, which comes to English by way of Arabic, and the Arabic comes from Sanskrit. For details, see this blog post.

Featured Storybook: Lost in the Woods: A Search Party in Peril. A young woman has gone missing in the woods, and her friends are determined to find out what has happened to her. They spread out into four separate search parties, facing the darkness with only flashlights — and stories — to help them find their way.

FREE eBook: Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights by E. Dixon. This blog post provides additional information about the contents of the book which includes a selection of fairy-tale type stories from Arabian Nights such as "Prince Beder and the Princess Giauhara" and "Prince Camaralzaman and the Princess of China."

Words of Wisdom: Today's proverb poster is Every hour has its end (a saying of Sir Walter Scott). Details at the Proverb Lab. Likewise, every week has its Friday!

Ramayana Image: Today's Ramayana image is The Marriage of Rama and Sita. You can see all four couples getting married in the same ceremony: Rama and Sita, Lakshmana and Urmila, Bharata and Mandavi, and Shatrughna and Shrutakirti.

Friday Event on Campus: As part of the Meacham Auditorium Film Series, there will be showings tonight of Dear White People at 6PM, 9PM, and midnight (details). Find out more about this and other events at the Campus Calendar online.

Note: You can page back through older blog posts to see any announcements you might have missed, and you can check out the Twitter stream for information and fun stuff during the day.