by Donna | Nov 30, 2015
Eighth Grade: Teach various types of writing.
It is easy to get in a rut in teaching writing—and have students write the same types of writing over and over (often narrative or informational from a given source). This is especially true if your writing program focuses on one type only (as many of our second semester books do; that is why we recommend your student do one first semester book first before delving in to his favorite type of writing only). By eighth grade, we should be making sure that our students can write various types of writing well….
by Donna | Nov 25, 2015
Eighth Grade: Teach various types of writing.
Once a student who has had a lot of writing instruction reaches eighth grade, he has probably had a lot of experience in sentence types, paragraph breaks, and multi-paragraph writing. This is a good stage to delve into various writing types, if you have not already done so. That is, it is great for an eighth grader to learn the nuances of not only “general” writing—but also the specifics of report, essay, and story writing. And even within those broader types of compositions, to learn about personal essays vs. persuasive ones and quotations in research reports and short story descriptive type of writing vs. longer stories with all elements of story writing.
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by Donna | Nov 19, 2015
Seventh Grade: Teach your student to apply his grammar learning to writing.
While my students often groan when they are told to mark the Checklist Challenge for that week’s homework assignment, they know (and I know) that it really does help. A student just told me this week that her sister had her scan and email her a copy of her Checklist Challenge to use in college—because she had used our CC for every writing project and knew how helpful it can be in revising writing…..
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by Donna | Nov 17, 2015
Seventh Grade: Teach your student to apply his grammar learning to writing.
Hopefully, this has been happening even earlier than seventh grade because seeing the “why’s” of learning something (“I need to learn prepositions so that I can spot prepositional phrases so that I can be sure that I have accurate subject-verb agreement” or “I need to learn how to punctuate double and triple adjectives so that I can write with them in my descriptive paper”) is extremely motivating to students.
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by Donna | Nov 10, 2015
Sixth Grade: Use good writing models for your student to write from.
Using good writing models for students is an outstanding teaching tool—as long as you do not use given source writing only. Students need to use a model to write from, then write that same type of writing themselves. This week’s tip focuses on how I do that with my students….
