Do your students have trouble coming up with ideas to put in their paragraphs? Are their paragraphs only one or two sentences long?
Are they a jumbled mess of ideas?
A paragraph is all about one idea. In it, your student will teach something about that idea, explain it, or prove why it is the right one.
In Intro to Writing, Part 4, you’ll find a practical chart to help your student formulate ideas and put them into a credible paragraph.
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Did I lose you already?
The idea of outlines and actually creating them can be confusing and frustrating to our students.
But what if we could make organizing material a little easier for them?
Intro to Writing, Part 3 takes some of the pain out of learning about outline. It uses material your students are already very familiar with: restaurant categories and the way grocery stores are organized.
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“A writer is simply a photographer of thoughts.” -Brandon A. Trean
Oftentimes our writing spills forth from an experience we’ve had or memory we’ve made. We keep a picture or image in our mind’s eye about that event, and it becomes the inspiration that prompts our writing. Have you experienced that?
Using someone else’s image or photo as a writing prompt can develop empathy and enable you to imagine the world from their perspective. That’s a valuable skill for a writer.
Grab these five fun photos here!
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SHARON’S BLOG
Summer is almost here, and that means picnics! When you think of picnics, what comes to mind? It might be fried chicken, sweet tea, or potato salad. You might think of your mom, siblings, or other family members at a park. Maybe you think of Frisbees, Nerf balls, or a blanket to sit on.
But you and your family aren’t the only ones at the picnic! You might see
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SHARON’S BLOG
Life is about making decisions, and you’ve got some large ones in your future.
Big ones include your future education or training: Should you pursue a college or technical degree. If you do, which one? Will you make the best choice? Will you change your mind several times?
What about marriage? Starting a family? Will that be in your future? Will you travel?
I’m sure you’ve heard your parents say, “If I knew then what I know now!” and understood them to mean that they wished they had some of their current wisdom to help them make decisions when they were younger.
What if, instead of looking backwards, we encouraged our future selves? You may not have all the wisdom you’d like to have now to inform yourself twenty years from now, but you know you better than anyone.
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SHARON’S BLOG
All this month we’re celebrating National Poetry Month with famous poems worth knowing. Be sure to check out the many links at the end of this post for more poetry appreciation and practice!
What is today’s poem? Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” Here are the first two lines:
I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree
SHARON’S BLOG
Have you ever come across something unusual and wondered how it got that way?
Robert Frost in his poem “Birches” does just that. He finds some birches in the woods that are bent down and wonders what happened to make them curve down. Did a boy come by and climb them, bending them down? Did an ice storm overwhelm the branches?
Then he remembers swinging on birch trees when he was a youngster, and he misses the little boy he once was. He misses the enjoyment of being young and swinging on birches.
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SHARON’S BLOG
Has something traumatic ever happened to you or your family?
When Anne Bradstreet’s house burned down, she was heartbroken and wrote a poem about it. Read her poem below in which she pours out her grief, her pain upon losing everything, and what she learned from this terrible situation.
What is unusual about this poem is that Anne’s house burned in 1666, at a time when many people did not value poetry and did not take the time or have the time to write it. Also, it is very unusual that a woman of that time would have been recognized as a poet and have her poems published.
Anne was the wife of Simon Bradstreet, a governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her work became so famous that her poems were printed in London as well. High praise, indeed, for a Puritan woman of that era.
Here’s her poem titled “Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 18th, 1666.” You’ll notice that some of the capitalization and spelling is different from ours today:
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SHARON’S BLOG
Jonathan and David. Anne Shirley and Diana Barry. Calvin and Hobbes. Those are some epic friendships!
The Bible has a lot to say about friendships. It warns us against foolish ones: “Do not be misled: Bad company corrupts good character” (I Corinthians 15:33). Scripture encourages us that a “friend loves at all times” (Proverbs 17:17).
Friendship is important to God. How important is friendship to you?
If we want to make new friends, we have to show ourselves friendly. As Dale Carnegie, the famous philanthropist revealed, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” That’s a challenge in a new group or situation, isn’t it?
Whether you have a new friend or a friend you’ve known since kindergarten, communication is important to the relationship.
A fun way to keep communication open is with a friendship journal. It’s a simple concept: You both answer a question in a journal and share your journal back and forth. You can make your own journal from a spiral-bound notebook or make your own book.
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SHARON’S BLOG
We like to think we’re fairly intelligent today, but did you know that the ancient Greeks and Romans harnessed the power of steam and wind 2,000 years ago?
Your students will enjoy these three prompts based on history and technology as they contemplate Hero of Alexandria, an ancient Thomas Edison, and how his inventions might have changed the world.
Random fact: Did you know that Hero invented the first vending machine? Patrons put in a coin and received holy water from his machine!
This week we’ve included plenty of links so your students can dig more deeply into these topics, if they wish.
Geared for middle – high school students.
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