National Poetry Month: Do You Haiku?

April is National Poetry Month. What a wonderful time to try your hand at writing a poem!

Haiku (high KOO) is a beautiful poem form that comes from Japan. It is usually about nature and can be spoken in one breath.

Syllables are important in a haiku. Words can be broken into parts based on their vowel sounds. Those parts are syllables. Tree has one syllable. Forest has two. And timberland has three. When you speak these words out loud, you can hear their syllables.

Haiku poems have another feature: They do not rhyme.

Two Secrets to Writing an Exciting Description

MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS

Reading descriptions can be super boring; you probably skip them when you read older books, especially if they go on and on.

Today’s writers know how to capture your attention and keep the descriptions interesting. What are their secrets? We’ll explore two today.

Senses

First, they use their senses. Here’s a fascinating verse about Jesus that the apostle John writes in the beginning of his first letter:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (I John 1:1 NIV)

How many senses from the list below does he depend on to tell us that Jesus is real?

5 Powerful Persuasion Strategies for Your Writers

SHARON’S BLOG

I love to bring you examples of effective writing so your students can use them, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of the U. S. Congress is an excellent example of persuasive writing. He used many powerful strategies in his speech, five of which we’ll delve into today.

Your students will better understand the intricacies of writing when they have the chance to learn from professional examples of published authors and speechmakers, so, to that end, let’s explore the persuasion tactics Netanyahu used.

Below are five powerful persuasion techniques. After the list, you’ll find a family writing prompt that involves one of them.

To read the complete transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, click here. .

A Topic Sentence at the End?

You are familiar with topic sentences, how they come at the beginning of paragraphs and tell readers what the paragraph is all about.

But what if the topic sentence came at the end of the paragraph? And what if that paragraph described something from a story?

Topic sentence at the end

Here’s part of a paragraph from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Notice the topic sentence at the end of the description:

National Reading Month: 5 Ways to Make Reading More Accessible in Your Home

SHARON’S BLOG

Do you have children or students who like to read but don’t have time?

How can you engender a love of reading in your home, even with reluctant readers?

Let’s create an atmosphere in our homes in which reading is not only possible but also enjoyable.

Shock Your Children with These Three Writing Tips

SHARON’S BLOG

Are your homeschool students completely and utterly bored with their writing lessons? Is it a struggle to get them to write again?
.
When it comes to writing essays, it’s easy for students to stall out. They need motivation. They need a change. They need some fun—and so do we!

3 Shocking Tips

Here are three shocking writing tips you can use in your homeschool—shocking because they are fun and because, to your children, they are totally unexpected.

Happy Birthday, Joseph Conrad!

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Although author Joseph Conrad was born in Poland as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he learned to speak and write in English in his twenties.

The fact that he learned how to write in the English language so late in life makes his command of the language, as seen in his stories, impressive.

Joseph Conrad is famous for his novella Heart of Darkness in which the narrator goes on a voyage to the jungles of Africa in the late 1800s in search of a man named Kurtz.

Below is the narrator’s description of a scene he comes upon. You can tell by the words and items he chooses in this description that what he finds next will not be nice:

When the Frost Is on the Pumpkin: 3 Fun Writers’ Devices

MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS

This is a good time of year to read James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost Is on the Punkin,” which you can read here. It describes the glories of life on the farm during the cool, crisp days of autumn, and the harvest season.

In the poem, you’ll find this phrase: “The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn / And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn. . .”

Note: Riley misspells “russel” on purpose. The correct spelling is “rustle.” Same with “tossels,” which is supposed to be “tassels.” And, of course “punkin,” which is, you guessed it, “pumpkin.” He’s using a country dialect in his writing.

Riley uses the three wonderful words “husky, rusty russel” to describe the sound of the dried leaves of the corn plant as they rub together in the wind. If you have ever heard those dry leaves or blades rubbing together, you can almost hear the “s” sound in the wind, as though they are whispering to each other.

What are Riley’s secrets to writing so well?

How to Convince an Audience: Opinion versus Persuasion

SHARON’S BLOG

You may be very good at expressing your opinions, especially when you want to change someone’s mind.

What you may not know is that if you truly want to change someone’s mind, you have to stop thinking about your opinion and start thinking about your audience.

This tutorial, with a free infographic to download, will show you very clearly the difference between writing an opinion and writing to persuade an audience.

Opinion versus Persuasion

Writing or expressing an opinion is all about what you like; convincing another person to do something is all about what they need to hear to be persuaded.

Here’s an infographic that shows the difference between writing an opinion and writing to persuade. After the infographic, I’ve included a short writing exercise you can do quickly. My writing class just did it, and they had fun sharing their ideas about alligators, snow leopards, snakes, and so forth.

His Hands Were Bigger Than Shovels: Hyperbole

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Hyperbole is a lot of fun to read and to write.

But what is it?

Hyperbole (hi PER bo lee) is exaggeration, as in “He was as hefty as a whale” or “Her whining voice so electrified the air that it knocked migrating geese off their course.” To read examples of this figure of speech, click here.

Just so you know, this figure of speech is also called a writer’s device and a literary device. And, just so you also know, “writer’s device” and “literary device” mean the same thing. The first is from the writer’s perspective; the latter is from the perspective of a student studying literature.

Here’s an example of hyperbole from Lee Child’s Personal in which he describes one of the bad guys:

Senses

Topic sentence at the end

3 Shocking Tips

Opinion versus Persuasion

Looking for something?

.