Would you like your students to understand how to use proofreading marks? Do they know that they do not have to proofread for everything at once?
And did you know that it is easier for students to proofread if they practice on someone else’s mistakes?
Explore the posts below, appropriate for 7th – 12th graders. Click on any post’s image or link below to get started. FREE tutorials and printables included.
What will your students learn today?
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Looking for a fun way to teach grammar concepts to your 7th – 12th grade students?
This bundle of tutorials is geared to hold your students’ interest with colorful infographics and quirky sentences to work on. Each tutorial contains a lesson, an exercise, and the answers, all free for you to download and print at your leisure.
Commas with compound sentences, dialog punctuation, singular indefinite pronouns, and much more!
Use them now or bookmark them for future use.
Some of the tutorials below are featured in our eBook Let’s Eat Fifi. Read more about that 23-lesson grammar book here.
Click on the individual images or the links below for each tutorial.
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Do you “have a plan” or have you “hatched a scheme”? Are your students writing about the “circulation” of the blood or about how the blood “circulates”?
Do they understand how to use specific adjectives? Do they know the power of connotations? Do they turn sluggish nouns into working verbs? Do they define their terms?
Enjoy these nine tutorials that teach all of these things and much more. They will instruct your students in the finer art of using the elegant English language. Now students are not just writing; they are communicating.
Appropriate for 7th-12th graders. Use the lessons now or bookmark them for future use.
It’s time to dive into the splashy end of the pool . . .
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Your students have to come up with a paragraph or an essay, but they do not know where to begin. They do not know where to get ideas, how to formulate a plan, how to narrow down their topic, how to organize their ideas, how to write a credible paragraph, and so on.
Does this sound familiar?
Then you’ve come to the right place! Use the links below to equip your students with the writing tools they need to be successful this year. Many of these links contain tutorials and free worksheets to download. I hope you like #s 10 and 11. Thousands of moms and teachers have already downloaded them and found happiness.
Ready? Let’s go . . .
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Our word choices can have a huge impact on our readers. Or the words can muddle them. Let me give you an example.
If I write that a toddler is a good eater, I suddenly have a communication problem. The word “good” is not specific enough. Does “good” mean that the toddler is neat while eating? Does it mean that the child eats a large quantity of food or perhaps a variety of food without complaining? My readers will not have a clear idea of my meaning.
Your middle school students will learn this in the first writing prompt. I’ve written a very boring paragraph about something that seemed exciting to the student, but the words I selected were flat, overused, and not specific enough.
Teens will have fun with the second writing prompt as they practice using specific words and phrases to get a point across or create a focused mood.
Ready? Let’s go . . .
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What are the benefits of owning a pet?
I’m sure you could list a few benefits off the top of your head. Good. Keep those in mind as we learn about an essay’s introduction.
When you write an introduction, you’ll want to include a few key items:
1. An intriguing first sentence to capture your reader’s attention. It’s called a hook.
2. A clear idea of what the article or essay is about (its topic).
3. A sentence that is the main idea (thesis statement) that will guide the rest of the article.
Here’s an example of an introductory paragraph about the TV remote. Although it seems serious, this student is actually poking fun at the idea that the TV remote has affected society:
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“Long, long ago, in a lavish lodge near the village of Liverwurst, lived a lovely lass called Linda the Lonely.
Linda was lonely because, ever since she was a little girl, she had been
locked in the lodge by her wicked uncle, Lord Ludwig of Liverwurst.”
So begins “The Legend of Linda the Lonely” in The Sesame Street Book of Fairy Tales.
By now you have noticed something strange about the first paragraph of poor Linda’s story—it’s full of the letter “L.”
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Advertising is everywhere. TV commercials bombard you 18 minutes out of every hour, but they are not the only places companies try to sell their products. Think of billboards, huge pictures of food products stuck to restaurant windows, and even your lowly cereal box.
Yes, even after you’ve bought the cereal, you still get advertisements about it. Take a look at a cereal box and notice all the adjectives there to describe the cereal and tell you how great it is. Here’s a sentence from my Cinnamon Life® cereal:
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Are you not sure what to do when your teacher gives you a writing assignment?
Check out this prompt. Let’s make your first steps in the writing process easier with these worksheets on brainstorming and organizing.
You want to avoid plagiarism in your writing. Yes. Yes, you do.
Plagiarism is using someone else’s quotation, facts, statement, idea, or story without giving them credit.
So, how do you let your readers know that you borrowed the quotation, fact, and so on?
You cite your source by using an in-text citation. This simply means you are giving credit to someone for their information, and you tuck it into your essay.
An in-text citation comes in tremendously handy when you are writing an essay that does not include footnotes, a bibliography, or a works cited page.
This is a tutorial on how to easily create in-text citations. Robin Hood may be involved.
Here we go . . .
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