Gardeners love to receive their new seed catalogs in the middle of winter. It gives them something to dream about and plan for. Not only are the photos of flowers and vegetables beautiful and inspiring but their descriptions are as well.
Here’s the description of the Erewhon Sweet Pea from a Burpee catalog:
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When Maya Angelou, author of the moving autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was eleven years old, she was reunited with her birth mother, whom she hadn’t seen in eight years. Young Maya was unhappy.
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After two weeks, her mother still had not seen her smile. Here’s the exchange between Maya and her mother, recorded in Mom & Me & Mom (Random House, 2013):
Proofreading is painful for students. They feel they’re through with the writing process when they write their first draft and then want nothing more to do with that essay. Students tell me that writing the first draft and proofreading it is like writing their paper twice.
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However, the skill of proofreading their own papers is essential to the writing process.
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What methods can we teach our students so they can proofread their work by themselves?
Some kids hate writing essays, and off the top of their heads they can give you 97 reasons why this is so.
When I teach my writing course locally, some students are bound to come to the first class with a “don’t even bother trying to teach me” attitude. They believe they are so far gone that they are unteachable.
I disagree.
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When you want to know what time it is, where do you look?
Most likely, you tell time by clocks of some sort. But what if you told time by flowers, birds, or scents?
Huh?
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Students who have a hard time writing about wars, politics, gender issues, and other heavy topics really warm up to writing opinions, so let’s give them something engaging to write about. After all, everyone has opinions.
It’s Just Lunch is a dating service for businessmen and businesswomen. According to their Website, they’ve provided over two million dates in major cities in the United States since 1991.
This is how it works:
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Recently I picked up my order at a local bookstore for a Book-of-the-Month Club I teach. The clerk asked me about the books because it was an unusual number, about thirty. When I explained that I was teaching literature to some homeschool teens, she came back with this surprising response:
Literature might seem like one of those courses in which pulling teeth is involved.
You assign a poem, play, short story, or novel to read, and you immediately encounter resistance. It’s hard, they say. It’s boring, they complain. The lawyer in them tries to make a deal with you: “I’ll read these more exciting young adult novels, and you can count that as literature. At least I’m reading.”
What can you do?
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Andrew Jackson once said that it was a poor mind that could think of only one way to spell a word. By this we know that he was not a homeschool mother who had to grade spelling tests every week.
Do you have a child who seems to defy your every effort to make him a good speller?
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Charitable organizations need help and often ask for money around Christmas and at the year’s end. You may be familiar with the bell ringers of the Salvation Army and their red buckets near store entrances.
The Salvation Army, the Red Cross, police and firefighter organizations, local food pantries, and local homeless shelters are all worthy causes that ask for contributions near Christmas.
Will you or your family be giving to a charity this year?
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