Use This Evaluation Form for Your Student’s How-to Essay
Here’s a free evaluation form taken from The Power in Your Hands: Writing Nonfiction in High School to help you grade those how-to essays.
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How to Create a Paragraph: Middle School Chart
Solid Help for Writing a Paragraph Do you have trouble coming up with ideas to put in your paragraphs? Would you like help organizing each paragraph so it is not a jumbled mess? Check out this chart below, along with one that is filled in, to make your life a little easier. {Here’s the HIGH…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
New Tutorials to Document Sources
SHARON’S BLOG Okay. I’ll admit it. I abhor the nit-picky rules about citing sources and making a works-cited page. The rules are tedious. They’re boring. And they’re nerve wracking. So, if it is hard for adults (which I like to think I am), what must our children and teens think of it? After all, writing…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
Fun with Outlines. No, Really.
SHARON’S BLOG Could your students use a little help organizing their ideas? And what does a bowl of salad have to do with outlines? Many students make their outlines after they have written their essay. This is fairly common. But is a formal outline necessary? Not exactly. You can read about my sticky-note method here….
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How I Saved My Own Writing Class
SHARON’S BLOG“I can’t think of anything to write about.” “This writing assignment is boring.” Sound familiar? It did around my house as well. My three children and I hit the wall and almost gave up on writing because it became so tough on all of us. But I saw value in my children learning how…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
Intro to Writing, Part 7: Introductions and Conclusions
SHARON’S BLOG Get a writing assignment. Look at a blank piece of paper for hours. Cry. Is this what happens with your students? No need for weeping. In this week’s Intro to Writing, your students will learn what ingredients to put into their introductions and conclusions. In addition, they will grade other students’ work and…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
Intro to Writing, Part 6: Easily Develop Thesis Statements
SHARON’S BLOG Thesis Statements A guy walks in to your living room and blurts out, “Pizza.” You look at him and wonder what he means. Well, you know the subject matter—pizza—but you don’t know where he’s going with this. He could take it in any of these directions: “I want pizza.”“Pizza is bad for you…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
Intro to Writing, Part 5: Point Orders
SHARON’S BLOG Problems with Point Orders? One of my students handed in an interesting essay on volcanic activity. She included lots of facts, dates, and anecdotes, but there was one big problem. There was no rhyme or reason for the order in which she put her facts. Each major or historic volcanic eruption was in…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
Intro to Writing, Part 4: Paragraphs
SHARON’S BLOG Can a chart rescue poorly written paragraphs? 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…
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High School Prompts | Middle School Prompts | Middle School Tutorial | Sharon's Blog | teaching aids | tutorial
Intro to Writing, Part 3: Outlines
SHARON’S BLOG Outlines. 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, shows students some fun and unusual ways to create outlines (organize their material)….
