.
Grading Essays Made Easy |Homeschool Life | Literature | Miscellaneous
Proofreading Tips | Writing Prompts
Writing/Teaching Tips | All
.
Want homeschool writing tips? Encouragement? Help grading those essays? Practical advice for your homeschool writing class? Insights into literature? Free writing prompts and tutorials?
Whether your student is reluctant or brimming with excitement, you’ll find solid, proven ideas here that will make your teaching life easier. And take advantage of the many writing prompts and tutorials posted here.
Subscribe to Writing with Sharon Watson and receive three FREE writing lessons. Just use the subscription form in the column to the right.
Be sure and browse the weekly writing prompts for middle schoolers and high schoolers.
This page may contain affiliate links..
Story Writing: The Resurrection
This week is Holy Week for Christians. We remember and celebrate Jesus’ Triumphal Entry, Last Supper, trial, death, and resurrection.
All the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) have accounts of the resurrection, but none of the accounts are written in first person.
Point of View
First-person point of view is when the narrator is telling the story, like this: “I saw the angels,” “I walked up to the tomb,” or “When we saw that it was empty, he went in and I backed away.”
The disciple John, when mentioning himself, writes of himself in third person as “the other disciple,” like this: “So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first” (John 20: 3-4). What would his story be like if he had written it in first person?
Many people are mentioned in the accounts of the resurrection: Mary Magdalene and other women, guards, angels, disciples such as Peter and John, chief priests, Cleopas and the other man walking to Emmaus, and Doubting Thomas. What story could they tell? (more…)
5 Powerful Persuasion Strategies for Your Writers
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: (more…)
Robert Frost: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors
In 1961, famous American poet Robert Frost did something no other poet had ever done.
He read one of his poems for a presidential inauguration. John F. Kennedy personally asked Frost to read a poem for the inauguration, and Frost recited his famous poem “The Gift Outright.” (more…)
