The history of the holiday known as Mother’s Day is an interesting one. It was founded by a single lady who wanted to honor her mother. Anna Jarvis arranged two ceremonies in 1908 to honor mothers and initiate the holiday. 

Soon thereafter, the holiday was catching on and Mother’s Day services were held in 45 states, as well as Canada and Mexico. For four years, Jarvis continued to advocate for a national holiday to honor mothers until she founded her own association in which white carnations were the icon and the terms “second Sunday in May” and “Mother’s Day” were branded. 

President Woodrow Wilson issued a proclamation in 1914 calling for the observance of the holiday (and other countries followed suit). Once the holiday became official, however, Mrs. Jarvis was unhappy with all of the hoopla. Evidently, she had planned for it to be a simple day in which a mother would receive a single white carnation and a handwritten letter. The gifts, parades, restaurant meals, parties, large bouquets etc. Jarvis actually wrote letters of protests and even tried to sue those celebrating the holiday in a manner in which she disagreed–stating that she had made the holiday herself. 

What does this history lesson have to do with English? Well, it turns out, in addition to feeling strongly about how the day was to be celebrated, Jarvis also felt strongly about the punctuation of the name of the holiday. She stated that it should be Mother’s Day–one mother possessing one day. It should be a day to honor one mother at a time, not a mass holiday, as in Mothers’ Day (in which the day belongs to many mothers). 

Nowadays, of course, we see the holiday punctuated both ways, though more often than not, it is the way Jarvis intended it to be–however, I dare say that the one carnation and hand-written letter policy are not still followed, judging by the crowds in restaurants today!

1. Mother’s Day—one mother–we write the word mother, and seeing that it doesn’t end in an s, we place the apostrophe then s Mother’s

2. Mothers’ Day–many mothers–we write the word mothers, and seeing that it does end in an s, we place the apostrophe on the outside of the s+

+Note that some handbooks say in this instance, we should still use an apostrophe s: Mothers’s Day, though rarely. Others say that if the addition of the possessive makes another sibilant, then use s’s. In our programs we teach the following:

1. Write the word you want to show possession to without considering the possessive part: Donna (or McDonalds)

2. Ask yourself if it ends in an s. If it doesn’t, add apostrophe s (Donna’s desk). If the word does end in an s already, just place an apostrophe on the outside (McDonalds’ fries).

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Welcome to another Punctuation Puzzle! Yep…a puzzle that you solve by putting in the correct punctuation and words/usage fixes–along with explanations and answers about each error! Perfect for students and teachers alike!

Today’s Puzzle is about plural nouns and past/passed confusion…..and it uses an interesting sentence from one of our Write-for-a-Month/Write On books about Cinderella. Read more….

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Today’s Puzzle is about Proper Nouns and Quotations… and it uses an interesting sentence from one of our Write-for-a-Month/Write On books about Pinocchio.

Read More

By Zac Kieser and Donna Reish

Read More

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The Checklist Challenge (CC), a challenging checklist of editing tasks, is included in ninety percent of the assignments in all one hundred of my books. It is taught extensively in the first couple lessons in each first semester Meaningful Composition book for grades 4 through 9 (and books 2 and 3 have lessons scattered throughout them). There are even downloads teaching nothing but how to complete this amazing editing tool (I really love the CC!).

But it has recently come to my attention that teachers really want help in scoring it. I mean, is a colorful paper enough? What about every box checked off? How about great adjectives and adverbs sprinkled throughout?

So, I have created a video that will at least get you started in how to grade your student’s CC—how to teach them to code it thoroughly, what a completed CC paper looks like, how to cross check the chart (and its check boxes for each task) with the student’s paper, how to total a score up, and much more.

I hope this video helps you see how you can quickly and efficiently score your student’s CC—and how the CC can be used as an incredible writing improvement tool at all grade levels.

How to Grade the Checklist Challenge

Love and hope,

The post How to Grade the Checklist Challenge appeared first on Character Ink.

Merry Christmas from Language Lady and Character Ink Press! It is the time of good cheer, festivities, magical moments with children, celebrating the Nativity–AND grammar errors galore! Usage errors are to be expected since many of the things we are writing this time of year are things we only write once a year. It’s hard to remember grammar and usage protocols that we use daily, much less ones that we only use yearly. I hope this post will clear many of your Christmas grammar issues up!

(Want to learn more grammar and usage from Language Lady? Check out these links:

• My new Tricky Tricks to Help It Stick Page
• All of our amazing Punctuation Puzzles
• The Write Right Quick Kit
• Preposition Practice Pack
• Think Fast Grammar Quiz)

This time of year we see a plethora of spelling, capitalization, grammar, and usage errors–on signs, catalogs, greeting cards, and more:

1. merry Christmas on a greeting card (which technically isn’t wrong, but just doesn’t look right either!)

2. “This line is for eight items or less”–even though it should be “eight items or fewer”

3. Xmas–even though the Associated Press itself says to never use this abbreviation!

4. Seasons’ Greetings (which indicates that you are offering someone greetings for more than one season–the plural noun seasons)

5. Happy capitalization guy or girl–Christmas Tree, Christmas Decorations, Christmas Ham, etc.

Many holiday greetings and terms are subjective (shocking, huh?); however, here is a list to help you see the most common ways that greetings and holiday words are expressed this time of year:

1. You can write any of the following:

a. Seasons Greetings (no possession shown at all–more of a noun describing another noun)

b. seasons greetings (same as a., but no capitalization–not recommended for greeting cards and headers)

c. Season’s Greetings (the most common way, showing that the season {one season} possesses the greeting; note the capping here)

d. season’s greetings (like c but not capped)

2. Of course, people also write Merry Christmas in different combinations (with and without the M capitalized; however, Christmas should always be capitalized because it is a proper noun by itself:

a. merry Christmas

b. Merry Christmas

3. To cap or not to cap greetings? This is a stylistic preference, but if it is in a header or greeting card, you definitely want to capitalize:

a. Season’s Greetings or season’s greetings

b. Merry Christmas or merry Christmas

c. Happy Holidays or happy holidays

d. Happy New Year or happy New Year

e. Happy Christmas or happy Christmas

f. Happy Christmastime (all one word) or happy Christmastime (again, all one word)

4. Words that are already proper nouns should remain proper nouns in every context and should retain their capitalization:

a. Santa Claus

b. Poinsettia–This is traditionally capitalized because the flower is named after a botanist and physician who was also the first US Ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett. In 1828, he introduced the plant to the country.

c. The actual holidays

i. Christmas or Christmas Day
ii. Christmas Eve
iii. New Year’s Eve (one year–singular YEAR…..hmm….”that doesn’t end in an s, so I need to put apostrophe s”)
iv. New Year’s Day

d. North Pole (Remember–you capitalize directions when they are part of a proper noun already–but not when giving directions. No “Turn West at the corner”!)

e. Jesus, Jesus Christ, Messiah–most Christian publications capitalize names for or references to God and Jesus

f. All locations associated with Christ’s birth and life as they are proper nouns already–Bethlehem, Nazareth, etc., and, of course, King Herod, Joseph, and Mary (but not shepherds or wise men)

g. When describing decorations, only capitalize the original proper noun:

i. Christmas tree
ii. Christmas wreath
iii. New Year’s Day dinner
iv. Christmas Eve party

h. Nativity is capitalized when it stands alone or when it is combined with non-proper noun elements

i. Nativity scene
ii. Nativity pieces
iii. Nativity story

i. Advent is capitalized in all contexts

Merry Christmas from the Language Lady!

The post Fix Those Christmas Grammar and Usage Errors! appeared first on Character Ink.

It has been said that when a banker or a counterfeit money “agent” learns about counterfeit money, he or she begins by learning what the real thing looks like.

I use this same approach to teach about sentences, clauses, and phrases in my language arts and writing books (Character Quality Language Arts and Meaningful Composition): teach the students what a real sentence looks like—and then teach what are not real sentences.

I teach what a sentence contains using a simple acronym: CAVES

Once a student learns what a real sentence is and can spot real sentences (and “non-sentences”), the possibilities for writing, sentence structure understanding, advanced sentence combining technique use, and more are endless!

Work on CAVES first—then your student will be able to do any and all of the following:

1. Tell the difference between a real sentence and a non sentence
2. Fix comma splices (since it will be obvious that this is a real sentence and that one is too)
3. Match subjects with their verbs in tense and number easily
4. Write with sentence openers clearly and in sophisticated manners
5. Combine sentences for all kinds of conciseness techniques and fancy shmancy writing

CAVES—it is what a sentence contains!
If you write a sentence and you are unsure of whether it is a “real” sentence, use CAVES.

When a sentence is not a “real” sentence, the culprit is usually the A one—All makes sense. And that “A” one will take us into sentences vs. phrases and clauses…on another day. Happy writing!

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An Introduction to Readability Levels

I began homeschooling over thirty years ago when Ray and I taught my younger sister (who was in eighth grade at the time) in our home. During my first several years of homeschooling, I used early readers when my children were first learning to read, but I did not care for “readers” for older children. I always felt that abridged or excerpted stories were inferior—and that children should read whole books.

This worked wonderfully for my first two (the ones who learned to read at age eight and nine). They didn’t like abridgements and excerpts very much anyway—and could easily read a couple of chapter books a week from ages ten and up. (I should note that they are both real literature buffs as adults, and our son teaches literary analysis of many novels to homeschooled students every semester. All of that reading really paid off!)

Then along came our third child, who begged for everything that I did not think was “best” for learning—workbooks (the more, the merrier, in her opinion); readers with excerpts and short stories; tons of what I had thought were useless pages of worksheets and coloring pages; and more. She was a different type of learner than Joshua and Kayla had been—and desired different learning tools.

So I began my hunt for “older” readers—readers for children beyond the phonetically-controlled ones that I had utilized to teach reading. I found many that I liked—and actually used some of them to read aloud to the kids since we found the stories and excerpts interesting and fun. They even caused my kids to go on and read entire books for themselves that they might have otherwise not known about or read (after reading an excerpted portion in their readers).

So…the moral of this story? Every child is different. Each child has his own learning style, likes, dislikes, etc. And we need to cater to those as much as possible in their learning. In order to choose reading materials for your children, a basic knowledge of readability levels will be a great help. I will detail readability levels and determinations in this month’s newsletter (March) and next month’s. 

When a child is in school, he is likely in a “reading group,” that is a group of children from his class in which all of the students read at about the same reading level. The child’s teacher chooses readers/stories for each group of children based on that group’s (the children in that group’s) reading level.

To practice with your child at home, you will want to do the same thing—but in a one on one, rather than small group, situation. How do you know what level is appropriate for your child?

I will enumerate some tips for choosing books at your child’s reading level, primarily for word-calling purposes. First, though, a small peek at readability levels will help you in determining your child’s reading level.

Readability is based on many factors. Many readability scales use one of a few simple formulae in which the number of words in a passage or story is divided by the number of words—and a readability level is derived based on the number of words each sentence contains (on an average). Other formulae use the number of syllables, considering that a sentence that contains twenty “one-syllable” words is certainly easier to word call than a sentence that contains twenty “three-syllable” words.

In both of those cases, the readability level is based on word calling, which is an accurate portrayal of early readers since children do not focus much on comprehension at that level of reading. (And if a class does focus on comprehension, it is usually just literal comprehension—what happened, who the characters were, etc.)

As students progress in their reading, we want them to not only be able to sound out words in a passage or story, but we want them to derive meaning from those words. Formulae for readability of a text based on comprehension is much more difficult to assess (though definitely counting number of words with longer syllables demonstrates a higher comprehension level than just merely counting the number of words).

So many things come into play when considering readability of, say, a chapter book of 150 pages. A book might be short but extremely difficult to comprehend due to the vocabulary used (which some formulae do not consider). Likewise, a book can be very long but have extremely immature vocabulary and not be difficult to comprehend at all.

In our language arts and composition books, we give students passages to write from at least half of the time for factual writing in the early grades, lessening as students learn to find appropriate sources themselves, etc. In choosing these passages to write from, comprehension is extremely important. In order to write from source material, a much higher level of comprehension must be realized than merely that of sounding out the words. In choosing passages for students to read, take notes from, and write from, we consider readability in terms of word calling first, then we consider sentence structure. Sentence structure includes the length of the sentence, the type of sentence (i.e. what we learned as compound, compound-complex, etc.), the type of and length of sentence openers a sentence contains (prepositional phrase openers, adverb openers, etc.), and finally, the vocabulary of the passage.

How does this apply to your reading with your student? Consider the list of ascending skills below concerning readability and readers:

Readability and Readers

1. In the early grades, you will be concerned with readability in terms of decoding, phonics, sight words, etc. That is, can your student read the words?

2. If your child already reads well in terms of decoding (sounding out words), and can “pick up anything and ‘read’ it,” you will want to focus on content—comprehending what he reads, discussing it, etc.

3. As students progress in reading, homeschooling moms and teachers in school often forsake the practice of reading aloud with children, noting that the child can word call anything, so there is no need to check for word calling skills/application of phonics. However, we advocate reading aloud with your child for some years, at least a couple of times a week. No, you will not be checking for word calling anymore (though my older boys will still say something like, “How do you pronounce this word—m-y-r-i-a-d?” when they are reading something to themselves), but reading involves word calling AND comprehension. A child who can “read anything” but not comprehend it is like a child reading “There’s a Wocket in My Pocket.” To say that a child in fourth grade can read at a ninth grade level because he can decode all of the words in a passage that is rated at a ninth grade readability level is like saying he can read the “Wocket” tale by Dr. Seuss. He might be able to word call it, but is he “reading” if he cannot comprehend what he reads?

4. Oral reading together with Mom or Dad at upper elementary grades is for comprehension—you will not necessarily be checking on the application of his decoding skills, but you will be checking on his comprehension, vocabulary recognition, etc. You will hopefully be guiding him through his reading, discussing it, answering questions about vocabulary words (i.e. words he can easily sound out but does not know the meaning of), etc.

5. If your child is beyond the beginning phonics instruction, you may not need books that are “graded” in terms of readability. Perhaps he already enjoys reading a certain picture book series or early junior fiction series. These can then become his “readers” to read with you.

6. Consider the differences in “readability” in the materials he reads with you vs the materials he reads to himself:

 
a. Be sure the material he reads aloud with you is somewhat challenging (i.e. he needs some help with words here and there but the books do not leave him in tears).

 
b. Be sure that what he is reading to himself is not so difficult that he needs cueing or instruction as he reads it.
 

 
c. Keep in mind that there are other things that affect readability besides syllable count, numbers of pages, sentence structure, and vocabulary. Interest is a strong factor in determining readability. (That is why I recommended the Saxon Bold Intervention+ for older students who need remedial reading on our Positive Parenting blog.The materials that they read from are high interest for older students—not childish or primary stories.) This is the reason that children who would not read their science or history book in fifth grade are picking up huge books of Harry Potter and these vampire books (not sure of their titles). Whether we like them or not, many children out there are reading these tomes simply because they are interested in them—despite the fact that those kids are not “at that reading level” and would never have picked up a book over two hundred pages prior to these books being released. (If you have an older student who is working on remedial reading, ask your librarian specifically for high interest/low readability materials for older students. Some of the adult literacy materials are extremely high interest with lower readability levels, as well.)

Other reading links:

Phonics Program Roundup for Reading Instruction

Using Word Cards for Reading Instruction

Reading Round Up: Tips for Teaching Your Child How to Read

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Once I talked on the Language Lady Facebook page about how many times I had said “A paragraph is a unit of thought” in three days of teaching. (Too many to count!) And promised a post about designing paragraphs, paragraph breaks, and general paragraph help. Here you go!

Dividing paragraphs is one of the most challenging aspects of writing for young writers and adults alike (along with many other challenging aspects!). That is why when people who do not write a lot write a full page with no paragraph breaks. That is also why middle school writers start writing and have no idea when to indent–so they randomly pick a spot (“Hmmm….looks like I’ve written enough to change paragraphs now…”) and indent.

While paragraph division isn’t always simple to determine (I admit to looking at a lengthy paragraph and thinking those middle school thoughts myself at times!), there are some tips that can make the process easier.

1. Think of the “main idea.”

Remember all of those achievement tests that had you color in the little oval for a reading selection’s main idea? Well, turns out that is actually a skill you might need!

When you are writing (assuming you don’t have an amazing outline to write from–see next item!), ask yourself what the main idea of the paragraph you are writing is? Then keep writing until you start writing something that is not about that main idea!

I know that sounds simplistic, but it truly is the way to determine paragraph breaks–because, as I mentioned earlier–a paragraph is a unit of thought. When that thought changes, you should change paragraphs. Then you have a new “main idea” of the paragraph.

2. Write from an outline.

I know, outlines are for people who have more time than you have. However, if you want to write clear, concise paragraphs, you should learn to outline. (Stay tuned to Language Lady. I will teach you how to outline painlessly. Honest!)

In the fifty curriculum books that I have written over the past dozen years, every single writing project I have created has a student commit to the paragraph’s topic in an outline before anything else. I use dozens of outlining techniques in my books–Paragraph House for second graders, split paper technique for comparing/contrasting writing, formal outline for research papers, scene outlines for stories. But every type of outline I teach has one common characteristic: the Topic of Paragraph line.

When you create a paragraph-by-paragraph outline, you learn to write strong paragraphs without even realizing that you are learning to write strong paragraphs. Why? Simply because you are committing to what each paragraph will contain right off the bat. And you are forced to change paragraphs (start a new one) at the right time. Try it!

3. A paragraph generally contains three or more sentences.

I say generally because nowadays, especially on blog posts and inspirational writing, this rule of thumb is broken all the time. However, for those in school turning in reports and essays, it is still an important rule of thumb.

A paragraph might contain three or four sentences, or might contain eight or nine, but generally, a paragraph of fewer than three sentences is not truly a paragraph. And a paragraph of twelve sentences probably needs to be broken into two paragraphs (with the first paragraph being Part I of the topic and the second paragraph being Part II of the topic!).

This rule of thumb is a help to a new writer on the shorter end of the spectrum. A new writer needs to know that he can write three or four sentences for a paragraph, and it will still be a paragraph. (Let’s give those new writers every break we can!)

4. Teach very new writers to write the “paragraph is a unit of thought” way by having them write on a subject with clear paragraph topics.  

I know some of you adults are tuning me out here, and I understand! Language Lady has a diverse audience of adults who want to know where to put commas in and how to speak and write eloquently in the work place to teachers and homeschooling parents and students! So I will try to give you a little of everything!

In this instance, though, if you are a parent or a teacher (or both), this little tip can really help your young writers. (I’m all about making learning easier for young ones!) In my younger books, I like to expand from one paragraph writings to multi-paragraph writings by taking a topic that is simple to divide: Three Best Pets, Four Great Presidents, Five Zoo Animals.

By making the paragraph breaks so obvious, a new writer can’t go wrong! He is not going to write about cats in his dog paragraph. In this way, it is really like writing three one-paragraph reports and “squeezing” them together. It starts new writers out in a fool-proof method–and gives them immediate success.

So whether you are a teacher instructing a little guy in his first two

-paragraph essay or a college student writing eighteen pages of a final

research paper, always keep in the forefront of your mind that a paragraph is

a unit of thought. (And don’t forget to outline!) Smile…)

PIN THIS POST!

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“Prepositions show position!”

That is where I start. The very basics. Catchy. Easy to recite. Simple to remember.

From there, we branch out to the explanation: Prepositions show position of one thing to something else.

Of course, prepositions show time, space, and direction (among other things) of one thing to another thing. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The first thing we need to know here about prepositions, as parents, older students, or adults, is the role that prepositions play in writing. So, today we will examine the role of prepositions—and tips, hints, and lists for learning these vital words. (Find all of my preposition teaching methods in the Preposition Practice Packet here!)

Our “grammar theory” here at Character Ink is that we learn grammar to write or speak.

I am a big “purpose for learning” type of teacher. If we know why we need to learn something, we will be more apt to want to learn it (or at least to see the value in learning it).

Thus, phonics is for reading and spelling. (No reason to learn phonics without also reading from a reader at the same time to apply the phonics skills.) And grammar is for writing and speaking.

So it is with preposition learning. Here is the sequence of “reasoning” for learning prepositions:

(1) Prepositions are words that are found at the beginning of prepositional phrases.

The prepositional phrase

a. A phrase—a group of words that does not contain a subject and a verb
b. Prepositional phrase–a phrase (group of words) that begins with a word known as a preposition

(2) The subject of a sentence is seldom found within a prepositional phrase.

Subjects in a sentence (anywhere in a sentence) must match their verbs in tense, number, etc.
Since the subject of a sentence is not found in a prepositional phrase, if you learn to recognize prepositional phrases easily, you can eliminate them (mentally) and easily find your sentence’s subject(s) and verb(s) to be sure they match.

We learn prepositions so that we can find prepositional phrase. One reason we find prepositional phrases is so that we can isolate them and match our subjects and verbs with each other.

A preposition is a word that shows position or time between one item and another. It is the first word of the prepositional phrase.

A prepositional phrase is a group of words that begins with a preposition and ends with the object of the preposition—the word that shows the “position” from or to. In the prepositional phrase, “the angel flew into the clouds,” clouds is the object of the preposition.

Again, we learn prepositional phrases so that we can mentally eliminate them in order to match our sentence’s subject with its correct verb. Recognizing and mentally removing prepositional phrases is a truly “writing worthy” skill as it will help a person write more grammatically correct.

Consider the sentences below that have the prepositional phrases isolated with parentheses. Once you mentally eliminate these prepositional phrases, you can easily match the sentences’ subjects with their verbs.

1. The boy (in the woods) was lost.

a. Isolating “in the woods” with parentheses keeps the writer from thinking that the sentence’s subject is woods—and keeps the writer from writing “woods were,” which is not correct.
b. The sentence’s real subject is boy and needs the singular verb was.

2. (On the outskirts) (of town,) a little house fell down.

a.This sentence contains a double prepositional phrase.

b. This double prepositional phrase is used as a sentence opener—coming before the sentence’s real subject and real verb.

c. By isolating both prepositional phrase openers with parentheses, we find that the sentence’s real subject is house (or a little house—some grammarians consider the one word subject and some consider the entire subject with its describers) and the sentence’s verb is fell.

3. The blonde girl (out of all the girls) was (on key.)

a. This sentence contains two prepositional phrases

i. Out of all the girls
ii. On key

b. By isolating them with parentheses (and thus, not considering them when we find our subject and verb), we can see that the sentence’s subject is girl and verb is was.

c. If we did not isolate “out of all the girls,” we might be tempted to think that “girls” is our subject and use the plural verb “were.”

Re-read the sample sentences carefully. Without isolating the prepositional phrases, would you have been tempted to use the wrong verbs?

Isolating prepositional phrases is one of the most helpful beginning writing skills that a writer can learn. It helps eliminate one of the most common sentence writing errors—that of mismatched subjects and verbs.

I think we can all agree that learning to recognize prepositional phrases is crucial to great writing! 🙂

Some Other Places to Learn About Prepositions:

Beauty and the Beast Preposition Packet

Preposition Practice Pal (with free download!)

Teaching Prepositions (video)

Prepositions List

5 Beginning Prepositional Tips

5 MORE Prepositions Tips from Language Lady

Punctuation Puzzle – Prepositional Phrases and Commas With Dumbo

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