I was fortunate to teach my senior high school class of young high school boys how to write an Expository Essay. Since a couple of the boys were sick, I did a Facebook live so that those students could watch it at home and go through their book as I taught. So… I thought I would share it on here and give you some essay teaching tips for young high school students.
Whenever I start out with new students in a class (Character Quality Language Arts or Meaningful Composition), I always spend the a little time each week for the first few class sessions learning how to complete my Checklist Challenge (CC). Over ninety percent of the papers in all of my books utilize this editing tool, so I spend a great deal of time teaching it and helping students learn how to complete the CC tasks. It is worth it to really dig in and teach students the fundamentals of the CC—including strong verbs and describers, sentence structure and rhythm, word choice, and much more.
I thought you might enjoy another peek into my Live Online Writing class to see what week three of the CC instruction looks like—and I don’t like for people to watch the video without the document in front of them, so you can print that below also!
Teaching MLA Research Reports is not for the faint of heart. After ten years of writing books with this method, I have worked and reworked the systems until I have some that students truly understand and can follow. They are interactive. They are visual. And they work.
My first Live Online Writing Class was a success! The students showed up and could see and hear me! I could see and hear them! They all had their books printed and highlighters ready. I didn’t get knocked off. It recorded properly. Yay!
The only thing more common in student writing than a run-on sentence is probably the run-on paragraph. Yep…run and run and run and run. And it isn’t the sweet student’s fault! (I have spent twenty years trying to help amazing kids not to be stressed about grammar—I would never blame them! 🙂 ) Paragraph breaking is often not taught well. (I know I wasn’t taught it—I can remember eye-ball measuring my text to see when I should start a new paragraph when I was in school!) This is why we emphasize deciding on what each paragraph will contain ahead of time (and why when kids in our classes do not write their Topic of Paragraph on the outlining space provided for that, they get docked one LETTER grade per missing paragraph topic line; it’s that important!).
Index cards. Hundreds of index cards. Stacks of sources. And hours of research and card making. Lots of confusion. And less understanding of how to synthesize the gathered information. Those are words and phrases that describe my high school composition class days. I finished my paper. I got an A–and then when I set out to write my books thirty years later, I knew I had to develop a better way. There had to be a method by which kids could research from multiple sources, organize that information, outline, and write—with less stress, headache, and bad memories (and hopefully WITH skills that they could carry on to college).
