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Grading Essays Made Easy |Homeschool Life | Literature | Miscellaneous
Proofreading Tips | Writing Prompts
Writing/Teaching Tips | All
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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.
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Be sure and browse the weekly writing prompts for middle schoolers and high schoolers.
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We’re All the Same, and We’re All Different
How are humans the same? How are we different from each other?
Explore this subject with your students and children as they dig into humanity and learn one method of comparing and contrasting as well.
This prompt comes in the form of a short video. I smiled and laughed through it but found something deeply sad in it as well. How will your students react to the silent messages in it? (more…)
Become a Poet
Has your sports team ever lost a game? And did you write about it in a poem?
You didn’t?
Well, Ernest Thayer did in the now-famous poem “Casey at the Bat.” You can read the history of the poem and the poem itself here.
October 2 is National Poetry Day, and recently the theme was “Remembering,” in which amateur and famous poets write to remember a special moment or a meaningful time in their lives. (more…)
Carnivore, Omnivore, Vegan, Vegetarian—What Do You Eat?
“We don’t need to eat anyone who would run, swim, or fly away if he could.”
The topic of the food we eat can be very controversial, and actor James Cromwell’s quote puts us right in the middle of it. (more…)
Proofreading Marks and How to Use Them
Do your students waste endless time erasing whole sentences? Do they become discouraged when they look at their rough drafts filled with arrows, illegible notes in the margins, and ugly lines of scratched-out writing?
Let’s save them the pain by teaching them these handy, easy-to-use proofreading marks.
I’ve watched students in my writing classes scratch out whole sentences and rewrite them. They draw lines through words. They burn up their papers and crumble their erasers just to change something.
This is totally unnecessary.
There’s an easier—and quicker—way to proofread that doesn’t require a lot of rewriting, which should be good news to our students.
But first, the other grammar tutorials
This is the last in a series of tutorials on grammar. In this one, you and your students will learn how to use these helpful proofreading marks.
If you’re dying to know what the other grammar tutorials are about, click here for one on punctuation in dialog. (Tarzan and Jane help out on that one.) Click here if you yearn to know how to handle commas in compound sentences with coordinating conjunctions.
And click here for the hard-hitting exposé on where to put the comma, period, colon, or semicolon when using quotation marks. Here’s a tutorial on a question I suspect you’ve heard from your students about using question marks and exclamation points with end quotation marks (you know, do they go inside or outside?).
For the tutorial revealing the crazy fact that the word “everyone” is singular, click here. And to finally put to rest your students’ confusion about it’s/its, you’re/your, and others of that ilk, click here.
Proofreading Marks
As with all the other tutorials, you get a super-duper package today: an infographic to teach the proofreading marks, an example of how to use them in a real paragraph, an exercise so students can fix someone else’s mistakes, and the answers. (more…)
