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…
You’ve just read the title of this post and are laughing uncontrollably. I get it. Writing is hard. My students confirm this, and so do yours. Many moms report that their students have ideas in their heads but can’t get them on paper. Let’s start fixing that today. What creates this strange head-to-hand disconnect? One…
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…
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….
SHARON’S BLOGLet’s use a quote from Confucius and a passage from Proverbs to get your students thinking about wisdom. In this bundle of writing prompts centered around wisdom, your students will encounter these types of writing: opinion, personification, parallel construction, definition, and more. These prompts are just right for students in grades 5 – 12. So,…
SHARON’S BLOGNarnia and Middle Earth—what delightfully intriguing places to visit! Enjoy this compilation of activities involving C. S. Lewis’s Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Suitable for anyone who is old enough to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, other Narnia tales, The Hobbit, or The Lord of the Rings. Your students…
SHARON’S BLOG Would any of your sentences ever sell for $1.56 million? That’s what happened recently with Albert Einstein’s one-sentence “Theory of Happiness.” The story, according to USA TODAY, is that Einstein was visiting Japan to receive his Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 when he did not have enough money to tip a messenger….
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…
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…
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…
