Proofreading. What a pain.
You finish your essay and think you’re through with it, but, no. Now you have to proofread it.
It turns out that writing and proofreading are two separate skills. In fact, they use two different parts of your brain and should be done at different times.
To take this a step further, when I proofread, I
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Students will follow along as I guide them through my experience with making stained-glass butterflies. As they read, they’ll be learning how to write a how-to and then insert transitions into the essay to move their readers easily through the process.
Suitable for students in 5th – 12th grade.
Last week I attended a class on how to make stained-glass butterflies. You know, the kind you hang up on a window with little suction cups.
My stained-glass butterfly and my mom’s. Hers turned out better than mine!
The teacher was very clear on how to do each step. We practiced cutting glass first, listening for the “hiss” that showed we were scoring the glass correctly with our cutters. After we had cut a line and a circle (both of which I messed up), he moved us to the next step.
I chose what I thought would be a simple butterfly design and found out how wrong I was.
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Across the country, nearly 1 out of every 4 high school students is dropping out, according to boostup.org.
Here are some statistics about dropouts. I was the most surprised by #11. That post mentions a “dropout factory.” You’ll find the definition of that term here, along with other facts about dropping out of school.
Why do you think students drop out of high school? Here are some interesting reasons, according to the students who are dropping out.
Do you think they should stay in school and graduate? After all, David Karp, founder of Tumblr, dropped out of high school
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Do you know someone who does not or cannot speak?
Many reasons exist for someone not speaking. For instance, someone may be afraid to speak and be an elective mute. Some may have been born with physical problems that make it difficult or impossible to speak. Others may have lost the ability to speak due to an illness, which is what happened to Don. You can watch his story here.
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I find writing prompts in the most unusual places, and this week’s prompt is no exception.
Have you ever eaten at a Fazoli’s restaurant? Their slogan is “Real Italian. Real Fast.” They may have the best breadsticks on the planet.
Their cups and breadstick papers are covered with sayings. I found this one on a cup with about ten one-liners like “Mom is not synonymous with waitress”:
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What do love and weather have to do with each other?
Quite a bit, it turns out. Forty-eight of The Beatles’ 308 songs mention some kind of weather, according to accuweather.com.
You can watch The Petersens’ version of “Here Comes the Sun” here. The song is written by George Harrison, formerly of The Beatles. You’ll quickly notice that the sunny weather is a metaphor for
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Famed physicist Stephen Hawking and others launched a $100 million program called Breakthrough Listen in their search for alien life beyond Earth. The search will begin with the one million stars closest to us in the Milky Way Galaxy and then expand into neighboring galaxies.
“We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth, so in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life,” Hawking said.
They have a lot of listening ahead of them. That’s a lot of area to cover!
Would you like to win a cool million?
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Do you want to influence your readers? Do you want to grab their hearts?
Use the power of story.
There are two kinds of stories: the true ones and the fictional ones. People have been using both kinds forever, and so can you.
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You learn important skills in essay writing that you can apply to other forms of writing, but are essays always the best way to communicate ideas to others?
When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. wanted to save a piece of American history in 1830, what did he do?
Did he write his senator? Take out an ad in the local papers? Write a letter to the editor? Make protest signs?
Although all of those things are legitimate ways of communicating with people, he did none of them yet still succeeded in saving the USS Constitution, an old warship that had fought in the important War of 1812.
How did he do it?
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Former U.S. presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson used to be hot rivals but became close friends later in life. In fact, for the last twelve years of their lives, they wrote to each other almost daily. In one letter about a year before his death, Jefferson wished the ailing Adams “nights of rest” and “days of tranquility.”
Near the end of their lives, they wrote to each other that they wanted something very special. Do you know what they wanted?
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