by Donna | Feb 18, 2017
“Conjunction Junction—what’s your function?”
Did you start to sing along? Can you picture the images?
How old are you????? lol
Most kids today are not raised on “School House Rock,” which is such a shame! Because you really can’t forget the songs, jingles, rhymes—and dare I say—rules learned from those little ditties. (You can still find them on Youtube!)
And those little ditties are really needed when it comes to commas! Commas are a mystery to many people–and rightly so! They are extremely subjective at times across the board. And then, different handbooks and authorities stress different rules for them, making them even more elusive.
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by Donna | Feb 11, 2017
My co-author and co-teacher (and amazing first born) just asked me a crucial grammar question: “How can any program not start out teaching how to find prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses?”
Of course, this led to a lengthy discussion about the two—how students can isolate these and then match up their subjects and verbs correctly; how they are crucial for sentence variety with sentence openers; and much more. (I love these discussions with my grown kids!!! 🙂 )
I touched on this in my previous blog post, “Why Teach Prepositions” that you can find here at the blog.
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by Donna | Jan 28, 2017
My Meaningful Composition co-author (my oldest child Joshua) and I have been writing a novel for, um, four years now. Well, truth be told, he has been writing it for nearly twenty years as he started outlining it when he was eighteen years old. It is finished actually, but Joshua is a perfectionist (at teaching, instructional writing, lesson plan preparation, and novel writing), so it isn’t finished in his eyes. We recently got it back out, dusted it off, and dug in to find his perfect spot again (and add in more technology…do you know how much things change in our world in four years?).
I have written seventy-five books in the past fifteen years—averaging 800 pages a book. The first forty were completely new books, and the next thirty-five have been re-writes and new books taken out of the original forty (i.e. half of the MC lessons came out of Character Quality Language Arts, for instance). But it has been a long journey nonetheless.
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by Donna | Nov 13, 2016
Have I mentioned how excited I am to be done with my Meaningful Composition (MC) elementary books? Yep, the second through fourth grade books are done, bringing the grand total of MC books to twenty-one books of 300 to 450 pages each! Shwew….what a relief!
I am slowly getting the videos up that go with the samples at the store. Each MC book has two weeks of completely free lessons (in their entirely..not bits and pieces). And each book will eventually have a video that explains that book’s contents and the two free sample weeks.
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by Donna | Nov 13, 2016
Teaching poetry can be a challenge. It is easy to get caught up in the mechanics of poetry when teaching about rhyme scheme. It is easy to get lost in imagery when teaching about meaning and depth of poetry.
Poetry Rap
Sometimes you just need a little fun when you’re teaching rhyme scheme—like in the Facebook Live videos that my students made of me teaching the about the importance of syllabication in rhyme scheme development—using funny rhymes and even a little rapping.
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by Donna | Sep 9, 2016
We made it! All twenty-one of the Meaningful Composition books are done! I wrote a few of them ten years ago, but over the past three years, I have written and/or revised all twenty-one books! Whooo….I’m tired! 🙂 But super excited!!!
Students everywhere (including public and private school students who can use the downloaded portions of MC, called Really Writing) can learn to write ALL types of writing (reports, essays, stories, dialogues, twice-told tales, and much, much more!) using my Directed Writing Approach—a pain-free, step-by-step approach to learning to write. I love kids—and I am so happy that kids will be able to learn with stress-free, amazing instruction and projects.
Meaningful Composition 5-I: Writing for Real
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