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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SHARON’S BLOG
Literature holds an Aladdin’s cave of treasures that students can plunge their pens into.
Whether it’s imitating good writing, pondering a topic in the story, or using the story to write another, your students will gain a healthy curiosity for great works of literature as they write.
To enjoy these fun prompts, knowledge of the following stories is not necessary.
Terms covered: epiphany, spatial description, and paraphrase.
These literature-based prompts are suitable for your 5th – 12th graders.
Ready to go treasure hunting?
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You know you have them—those story writers who won’t come out of their bedrooms, the ones who faint at writing essays but love writing stories.
They spend hours creating fictional worlds and populating them with characters in trouble who are looking for a happy ending.
Fiction is a powerful tool to influence readers’ hearts. Let’s equip our fiction writers with practices and insights that will give them success. You can read more about how authors grab readers’ hearts here.
As an added bonus, students who learn how to write more effectively in the world of fiction are absorbing communication skills they will use in their essay and research papers as well.
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein before she was 19 years old. Christopher Paolini was only 15 when he wrote the first words to his best-selling Eragon. And Jane Austen wrote her first novel at age 14. When will your student be signing autographs?
These prompts are geared for students in 7th-12th grade. Use them now or bookmark them for later.
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Do you ever wonder why some ads and political campaigns are so powerful? There’s a reason for that: They use certain strategies to move their viewers.
It’s important to learn these strategies so you can see when they are being used on you!
In this tutorial, you’ll learn three powerful tactics, read examples, and then write your own ad for a product or a politician.
This tutorial is geared for students in 7th – 12th grade.
Ready? Let’s do this . . .
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Have your students ever been asked to write a compare-and-contrast paragraph or essay but don’t know where to begin? Do they have trouble organizing their thoughts and information before comparing and contrasting?
Your 5th – 12th graders will learn two solid methods for compare-and-contrast writing with this free tutorial. It’s packed with two separate exercises, one for each method, and contains complete instructions and colorful worksheets. Your students will learn how to organize their thoughts before writing with either method, and then they’ll write two paragraphs using each method.
Students already know how to compare and contrast in real life: They do it every time they want to buy something and are torn between two choices. They go through the process mentally, and it’s likely automatic and subconscious.
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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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Persuasion. How-to. Compare and contrast. Enumerative. Are your students baffled by these types of essays?
Take heart! Use the 13 links you’ll find below that show how to format and write 6 types of paragraphs and essays.
As an added bonus, the last link leads to a very handy writing schedule you can use all year. Never say, “Write an essay,” again! (You’ve got to be kidding!)
These tutorials are appropriate for students in 7th – 12th grade. Use them now or bookmark them for future use.
{Writing Tip: If your student is not quite ready to write a whole essay, give him or her practice in writing the types of paragraphs you’ll find in this post. For instance, instead of writing a whole compare-and-contrast essay, how about a compare-and-contrast paragraph from one of the links in #5?}
Ready? Let’s go . . .
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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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