This Week’s Video Topics!

July 8-12

Previous Topics—Go to Donna’s FB to Watch These!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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So many grammar debates, so little time. And here’s yet another one: Are proper adjectives a thing? Or are they really just proper noun elements within a common noun?

We will likely never know for sure….

However, it really doesn’t matter what you call them. They need some proper capitalization!

So let’s start with the proper noun. (Practice proper nouns more HERE!)

We have a tendency to think that the noun is the first part of speech we learn, so it’s automatically simple to locate, which isn’t true at all (it’s true we learn it first–just not true that it is simple!).
A noun can become many different parts of speech.

1) Take the word school–I’m going to school you (verb)

2) The school children (adjective)

3) She is so schoolish when she explains things (adjective)

4) Let’s go to school now (finally, the noun).

One cannot truly find the part of speech that a word is when the word is out of context. (Be careful of programs that teach parts of speech out of context if you are choosing grammar materials for your children! They should never be given a list of words and told to tell the part of speech of each one!)
The same thing is true of capitalization–we learn it early, yet it is far from simple.
*Cap this in this instance but not in this.
*Cap this when it is used as an address but not when it is used in a non-address scenario.
*And on and on.

Into that madness, enter the proper adjective–another capitalization nightmare, in many cases.

Essentially, a proper adjective is a proper noun used as an adjective. The key to using this properly (with the proper capitalization) is knowing for sure that the word is usually a proper noun (without having context, in many cases!).

For example, the following words are capitalized when used as adjectives:

1. Spanish….Spanish speaker

2. Jesuit…Jesuit priests

3. Herculean….Herculean effort

4. French…French braid

So…. a proper adjective is essentially a proper noun that has been put into adjective form.
Words are different parts of speech based, oftentimes, on their suffixes. For example, loveliness (with the ness suffix) is a noun…but changing a suffix often changes a word’s part of speech. Thus, lovely is an adjective; loveliness is a noun.

There are many other difficulties with proper adjectives and proper noun elements within common nouns.

For example, animal, flower, plant, and tree breeds are not capitalized (i.e. husky, mockingbird, rose, poison ivy, and sycamore tree). However, if a proper adjective or proper noun element is part of the name, that part of it is capitalized (but the rest of it remains lower case):

1. black-eyed Susan (Susan is a proper noun in other contexts, so it gets capitalized here as well)

2. Australian sheep dog

3. Alaskan husky

4. Jack Russell terrier

No wonder our students are confused!

It is up to us to help them with these challenging usage scenarios.
We can do this by…

1) Being patient with them. (Sometimes we have to look these things up ourselves!)

2) Giving them lots of practice with them–and verbal feedback and discussion of the practice sentences and exercises.

3) Not making everything “count.”

A word about number three above. In my books, I use a TPA approach—Teach-Practice-Apply. This means they learn the information in the teaching portion of the book. Then they practice the skills with little or no grading. This is done in passages of material usually–completely in context. Then they apply it in exercises/assignments, and, ultimately, in the Checklist Challenge and their writing–where the rubber really meets the road and where we want the application to really sink in.

Let’s make grammar, usage, spelling, writing–all the things–as easy as we can for our students! 

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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,

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We get asked a lot lately about how many of our products are now downloadable. Turns out that making 300 to 1600 page books into individual downloadable lessons and booklets takes a whole lot more time and effort than I envisioned! 😉

But we are doing it….little by little! This post will give you a little glimpse into what we have done so far and what our plans for the future are!

1. Write On, Mowgli; Write On, Peter Pan; Write On, Beauty and the Beast–our darling Book-Movie-Book month-long writing booklets are all available now (fifteen total!). We will be adding Write On, Christmas Friends this fall with some amazing holiday writing lessons that I have been testing over the past two years (with amazing samples of all of the projects!). Click HERE to view our books.

2. Really Writing was my original brainchild for converting Meaningful Composition writing assignments into downloadable monthly booklets for homeschoolers and brick and mortar schoolers. They are cool books–but the branding has kind of been all over the place….so look for these to change to Write-for-a-Month this winter (at our store and our Teachers Pay Teachers store). In the meantime, we have a few of them up as RW and dozens more to go up soon! Click HERE to view our books.

3. We have very gradually been getting other language arts downloads up. We have offered several of those as freebies on the blog and in our newsletter. These are cool booklets that REALLY work! We have our “How to Complete the Checklist Challenge,” “How to Write From a Source,” “How to Use Our Writing Boxes,” “Preposition Practice Packet,” “Think Fast Grammar Quiz and Answer Key,” “Write On Audio and Booklet Set for Teachers,” and much more! Click HERE to view our other Language Arts downloadable products.

Of course, we still have our print book lines, Character Quality Language Arts and Meaningful Composition!

Thanks for being a part of Character Ink!

Love and hope,
Donna

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Fourteen down, one more to go! Then we will have all 15 of our Write On downloadable books up for sale at the store, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Amazon! This post is to let you know about one of my faves—the Level IV book of the Peter Pan series. Take a look at the extensive sample pages for this book here at our store, and read on to find out why your kids will love our Write On books—and especially why your upper level students will love Peter Pan IV!

Here is what you need to know about the entire series of fifteen books:

1) They are called Write On (clever, huh?) and then a character’s name:

Write On, Peter Pan

Write On, Beauty and Beast

Write On, Mowgli (Jungle Book)

2) There are five books of each title—five levels:

I—2nd-4th grade writers

II—-4th-6th grade writers

III—6th-8th grade writers

IV—9-10th grade writers

V—10th-12th grade writers

3) Each book comes in print form directly from us (Character Ink store) and in downloadable format from our store, Teachers Pay Teachers, and Amazon.

4) They have a variety of writing types. Each store description tells what types of writing project each level contains.

5) They have our best and newest teaching methods. No vagueness. No writing ideas. You and your student will know what to do every step of the way.

6) Each project has a detailed sample of that project. I can’t stress this enough. All writing books should have a final product showing what the expectations are for the assignment.

7) They are incredibly fun and engaging. We have been testing them for four years now—and our kids love them! (We test all of our books with 100 students a year in various locations—live and online writing classes.)

8) Each book has at least a dozen sample pages to print off or look through where ever they are sold!

Here is what you will find in Write On, Peter Pan, Level IV:

A. This Level IV book is designed for beginning to upper level high school students and contains the following projects (from prewriting through final product with all the instruction and skills needed for each assignment):

I. Essay Writing—Three Reasons Hook Is a Good Villain or Peter Pan Is a Good Hero

ii. Original Story of Someone Getting Away From a Villain on Hook’s Ship

III. An Original Research Report About One Thing of Aspect in the Story of Peter Pan

B. Each project has detailed samples for students to see how the project was written by another student.

C. Each project has in-depth lessons of all of the skills needed in order to complete that project—

I. The 1-3-1 Essay Approach
II. Quotation Inclusion in Essay Writing (with punctuation lessons)
III. Thesis Statement instruction
IV. Directed Brainstorming Boxes
V. Sentence-by-Sentence Outlining, including links/transitions
Vi. Writing With a Series of Three or More
VII. Extensive Checklist Challenges
VIII. Dialogue Writing
IX. Said/Asked/ Exclaimed lesson
XI. Colon use in dialogue—and more!

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Our newest fourth grade composition book is up! Well, it’s not really new…it’s just one of the last two books of the Meaningful Composition series to be revised. And I am so happy with it!

I am happy for all of the regular reasons: (1) It is completely directed—no guess work, no vague ideas of what a student should do, no writing idea book or prompt book; (2) It follows the same layout—each project is one or two weeks long; (3) It teaches the skills needed to complete each project (when an assignment has the student add a quote, it has extensively quote lessons to teach them HOW to add quotes!); (4) It has the outlining spaces, brainstorming boxes, etc., all within it; (5) Has samples galore; and much more.

(See me, two years and 30 pounds ago explaining the details of MC HERE) 🙂

(Or find out why MC works HERE)

True to all of our second, third, and fourth grade books (and all first semester books for 5 through 9), it has the HOW TO’s in the first section. In this case, it has:

(1) How to Write From Sources Using Our Signature Writing Boxes (super effective writing approach that Cathy Duffy loved that is in all of our elementary MC, Write On, and Write-for-a-Month books);

(2) How to Write From Sources Using Our Sentence-by-Sentence Outlining Approach;

(3) How to Complete Our Signature Checklist Challenge. These are step-by-step lessons on our approaches that fall in the first few weeks of each MC first semester books (2 I through 9 I). (Of course, they all teach these lessons with different level-appropriate materials!)

And then…..the absolute darling-ness-factor of this book……

1) Starts out with an Alice in Wonderland writing boxes lesson

2) Has amazing people for them to write about—-Clara Barton, George Washington Carver, and more

3) Contains a Peter Pan story-writing-from-given-source lesson (darlingx5!)

4) Teaches how to write opening and closing paragraphs using sets of animals that display various qualities

5) Uses “zoo information cards” to outline original animal paragraphs

6) Teaches a book report using a meaningful story that they choose about people who were reconciled to each other (okay..little conflict resolution lesson in there!)

7) Has a perfect balance of given sources and original writing for this tender writing age

8) One of the original projects is interviewing pet owners and writing two paragraphs—what fourth grader doesn’t love pets???

I’m crazy about this book, and I know you and your young writer will be also! But just to be sure you know what you are getting yourself into, go ahead and print off three weeks of the sixteen weeks to try with your kiddos! It’s free….because we want you to love what you are buying before you buy it! Get that sample HERE!

Check out all levels of MC at our store—two semesters of each book for second through twelfth grade students. This is the most versatile writing program you will find—no expensive videos or extensive packages; everything contained in each one semester book; Directed Writing Approach throughout. Add a grammar program to 5th through 12th grade books, and you are good to go.

No need to add a grammar program to the elementary books! The 2 I, 2 II, 3 I, 3 II, and 4 I books are grammar-included, so no other English book is needed.

Click the image below to view MC 4-II in the store!

Click HERE to view our other Meaningful Composition books! 

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Sentence openers. Non-essential information. Dress up openers. Introductory material. Or my personal definition: “A word or group of words that is put at the beginning of a REAL (complete sentence) to add more detail, different sentence rhythm, interest, and variety.”

Regardless of what you call them, they can be tricky to teach for sure. And the biggest obstacle I have seen to teaching them is the simple problem of students not knowing whether a sentence is a real sentence to begin with. Students will never get a good handle on sentence openers (also called introductory material or non-essential information at the beginning of a sentence) UNTIL they have a handle on what a sentence contains.

In other words, they have to be able to tell the five parts of a sentence (CAVES–Capital; All Makes Sense; Verb; End Mark; Subject) before they can truly find and punctuate their sentence openers properly.

Here are some tips on working with students concerning base sentences and sentence openers:

1) Use a trick or mnemonic device to teach students the five things a sentence must contain in order to be a sentence.

I use my mnemonic CAVES

Capital letter

All makes sense

Verb

End mark

Subject

(See more CAVES info HERE and find my Think Fast Grammar Quiz and Answer Key HERE {that we use to practice writing CAVES each week}.)

2) Cover up all sentence openers with fingers.

Say the “sentence” that remains aloud. Talk through the parts of a sentence. How can they know that a real sentence remains? It has to have a subject and verb. It has to make sense when it stands all alone.

3) Read sentence openers aloud with inflection where the comma goes.

Teach students that the comma goes where the voice goes up. Teach that the “real” sentence begins when the sentence opener ends. Walking through these orally with emphasis REALLY helps students hear the “correctness” of a sentence.

4) Work extensively on sentences that do not have sentence openers, helping students get a handle on what a real sentence (without an opener) looks like.

It’s important not to jump ahead too quickly. Internal sentence punctuation is way easier to teach after ample practice without sentence openers, ending which and who clauses, compound sentences, and other complex/compound sentence complications mudding the waters too early. Those will be SO much easier once a student can look at any group of words and quickly correctly say, “Yes, that is a sentence” and “No, that is not a sentence.”

5) Make it a habit of isolating sentence openers when dissecting sentences.

I use the following protocol:
a. Place parentheses around all prepositional phrases anywhere in a sentence.
b. Place brackets around all subordinate clause openers.
c. Place “less than/greater than” (<>) around all other openers

We are just placing parentheses around prepositional phrases anywhere in sentences for quite a while. This is okay. It gives us the opportunity to find the “realness” of sentences by locating main subjects and main verbs and by “hearing” what a real sentence sounds like.

6) Use verb practice extensively.

Every paper that students write for me has its verbs circled via my Checklist Challenge. Working with sentences in this manner helps students to see that a sentence must contain at least one verb in order to be a sentence.

(See my Checklist Challenge packet and video HERE.)

In emphasizing what a sentence must sound like in order to be a real, complete sentence, we also must emphasize that in order to have a chance to be a real sentence (and sound like a real sentence), it must have a main subject and a main verb. Continuous verb practice helps greatly with this.

To learn more about teaching verbs click HERE.

7) Have your students memorize being, helping, and linking verbs.

Teaching students that a verb is something you do, an action, and having them find those action verbs will definitely fall short as soon as a being verb is encountered. For this reason, I use my BHL Verb song to teach Being, Helping, and Linking verbs starting in elementary school. In order to tell that a group of words is a sentence, a student must be able to spot that sentence’s main verb. If they are only looking for action verbs, they will often think that a group of words is not a sentence when it really is.

(These are in my Think Fast Grammar Quiz and Answer Key packet. You can also learn more about them by clicking HERE.)

8) Practice orally with the “Sentence/No Sentence” game.

You say groups of words and have the tell you whether they are sentences or not and why. Again, oral practice is so important. And…so is telling you why a group of words is not a sentence.

9) Read the sentence opener and discuss how it is NOT a real sentence.

A sentence opener is added to a real sentence to give more information, change sentence rhythm, and provide conciseness. However, it is not a sentence itself. Again, add emphasis by bringing your voice up at the end of an opener. (Remember, grammar and usage are for speaking and writing—be sure you are teaching them orally when applicable)

10) Teach sentence openers one at a time, starting with the most familiar to them (usually prepositional phrase openers).

(Check out my Preposition Practice Packet here or my Beauty and the Beast Preposition Practice Download HERE!)

I like to start working on prepositions almost immediately when students begin language arts studies (after reading fluency is reached). We can learn 100 of them quickly. Then we can spot prepositional phrases quickly together. (Again, use oral instruction for this “to the what?” “from whom?” “down the what?” to help students find where a prepositional phrase ends.) All of this can take place while you are still working on sentences—before you even begin discussing prepositional phrases as sentence openers.

We often want to rush things. We want to add all of the “extras” to sentences. I understand this. My entire Checklist Challenge is based on adding material to make sentences, paragraphs, and reports/essays/stories sing. However, just like everything else, when we put the “cart before the horse” and teach the “fancy shmancy” before the “ordinary,” our students get confused and true learning does not take place.

The post Tips for Recognizing Base Sentences to Teach Sentence Openers appeared first on Character Ink.

1. They use my Directed Writing Approach!

In my Directed Writing Approach, every detail of every project is laid out for your student. None of my writing projects are “writing ideas” or “writing prompts.” Every writing assignment contains step-by-step instructions with much hand-holding along the way. The student is “directed” in how to write and what to write at all times—from brainstorming to research to outlining to rough draft and finally to revising.

My Directed Writing Approach takes the best methods I have discovered in order to teach each type of writing—color-coded research for research-based projects, “Topic of Paragraph” commitment for teaching paragraph breaks, The Three P’s of Persuasion for persuasive writing, the “section-paragraph-sentence” method for longer papers, story writing mapping, Paragraph House for young writers, 1-3-1 essay outlines, my Checklist Challenge for revising, and much more. Each Directed Writing Approach “method” is tried and true after fifteen years of my writing one hundred books and over fifty thousand pages!

Click on the picture above to view free samples of these books!

2. They contain a combination of projects—those with “given material” to write from and those that are completely original (in which student finds material on his own to use as his source).

Students are taught a wide variety of outlining methods in all of my books—Key Word Outlines From Given Material, Directed Brainstorming, Persuasive Mapping, The Paragraph House Outline, Split Paper Technique, Sentence-by-Sentence (S-by-S) Outlining from original sources, Q and A Outlines, Five W’s outlines, Scene Outlines for Story Writing, Formal Outlines for research, and much more.

I teach most writing types/projects by giving the student source material to take notes from first—then having the student branch out and write that same type of writing finding his own source. It is this combination of “given material” first followed by student-found material that gives the student confidence to write that type of paper or story. This method keeps the student from becoming too dependent upon given source material while at the same time helping him learn to find source material (or create his own!) after using given passages first. It is a win-win method.

Click on the picture above to view free samples of these books!

3. The skills that are needed for each writing project are taught within that writing project.

To ask a student to write a paper using three sources and two quotations without teaching the student the skills to complete those steps is cruel! When a project is being taught in my books, the student is also taught whatever skills are needed to complete the project.

 
For example, if the student is writing a story about an animal escaping, he will be taught words and vocabulary that describe various sizes and types of animals as well as how to use onomatopoeia to describe animal sounds. If a student is told to write a persuasive paper, he will be taught the elements of persuasive writing first. If he is writing a research report in which quotes are to be cited, he will be instructed first in how to use quotations (in an earlier lesson) then in how to cite them for that particular paper. These many “how to” lessons give students the tools to write whatever they are assigned easily and with confidence.

Click on the picture above to view free samples of these books!

4. Books are tested with over one hundred students each semester!

My books are not written by grammarians behind closed doors or even by experts who seldom work in small groups with students. (While my undergraduate degree in elementary education and my master’s work in reading specialist do help me occasionally, it is homeschooling for thirty-two years and testing my books every year {and writing and rewriting!} that give me my writing credentials.)

 
Character Ink books are written by teachers who write meaningful lessons then take them out and test drive them for two to five years with over a hundred students each semester. (My new 10 II: Four Research Reports has been tested for six years now—and took over a hundred hours to write and perfect the MLA/quotation citation methods lessons alone!)

 
Every year Character Ink has local cottage classes for homeschooled students in which small groups of students (six to ten per class) take either our complete language arts (Character Quality Language Arts) or our composition-only (Meaningful Composition) classes. As we test our books, we make notes in the margins, discuss them with our students (why was this one so hard for you when the last one was easier?), talk among the teachers, then go back and fix the books, tweak the lessons, and even drop lessons that are too confusing or uninteresting to students. You can’t possibly know if a lesson or project is a good one until you have sat across the table from eight junior high boys to watch their expressions (and/or glossed over looks in their eyes!). This is how we know our programs work!

Click on the picture above to view free samples of these books!

5. Student writing samples are provided for all original writing projects and portions of samples are provided for smaller assignments.

Our books have a little extra something that is seldom found in textbooks and certainly never found at the level of ours—student samples! Each of the original projects have a full-length student sample of that project. As a matter of fact, we use the student samples in our books to teach from—starting with Thesis Statements, Thesis Statements “Reloaded,” and other LINK sentences on to paragraph breaks, proper quotation use, scene development in stories, and much more.

 
Students understand the writing project so much better when there are models for them to look at and when they see what the expectations are for the project. Parents love our student samples because it helps them measure their student’s skills in following the instructions for each project (and gives the parent confidence to know if her student is completing the assignment correctly).

 
Our student writing samples are provided in all types of projects—expository essays, biographical reports, research reports, short stories, twice-told tales, persuasive essays, and more. Your student will know from the beginning what each project involves as the book takes him through a sample to see what great project he will be doing! Student samples are invaluable!

Need further evidence? Go to our blog and print off two weeks of free Meaningful Composition samples at each level (or several pages of the downloadable books). Try before you buy! You will be amazed at how quickly your students become accomplished writers—and how pain-free teaching writing really can be! 🙂

*Write On downloadable and print books (Write On, Mowli; Write On, Peter Pan; Write On, Beauty and Beast); Meaningful Composition; Character Quality Language Arts; and other downloadable e-books.

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I won’t tell you how many weeks it is til school starts for our “Half-Day Homeschool” or our “Cottage Classes, but we all know how fast summer goes by! I hope you are enjoying your summer break–and getting some good school planning in here and there. To help with the latter, I would like to gift you my Think Fast Grammar Quiz book with detailed answer keys!

One of the ways that I teach writing is by helping students memorize the types of words that they will need to use with commas, semicolons, etc., and the types of words that they will need to use for various expressions (exceptions, giving more info, showing examples, elaborating, etc.).

I teach these to my students through rhymes, songs, jingles, mnemonics, check sentences, and more…..and then they are quizzed on them every week in order to learn them at a snap of their fingers.

This quiz booklet is that.

Here is how our store describes it:

“In this document, you will find Character Ink Press’ (CI) original Think Fast Grammar Quiz (Beginner’s Level and Advanced Level) and page after page of answers divided by category.

In testing my books, I have learned the importance of two things:

(1) Recitation/memorization of the parts of speech that are constants AND

(2) Teaching HOW to use these parts of speech (via my Checklist Challenge—intro packet available HERE).

This free 26 page document will help you with the former—teaching, memorizing, and quizzing the constant parts of speech (those with definite lists).

The quizzes test students (or give practice in) prepositions; Be, a Helper, Link (BHL) verbs, coordinating conjunctions (FANBOYS), interjections, subordinators, and conjunctive adverbs. These are taught in our books (and in the Answer Key) through rhymes, jingles, songs, and mnemonics.

The lengthy Answer Key for these quizzes is divided by categories—even breaking prepositions down to ones taught with a Preposition Practice Pal, with synonyms and antonyms, with compound words, with Check Sentences, and by initial letters. You will not find a more thorough list of these parts of speech anywhere—especially lists with the tricks and tips that CI materials provide.”

Regardless of the grammar, usage, or writing program that you use, the Think Fast Quiz and Answer Key booklet can be a huge help to you. Let me know what you think—and if you need help implementing it.”

Click on the picture below to go to the store—and use your freebie code QUIZFREEJULY (hurry! It’s free only until August 1st, 2018)!

Think fast,

Donna

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