I am sort of on a writing about writing kick lately, huh?  Well, today is no different.  I have just been spending so much time on the subject because, well, let's face it, these kids have to know how to write for THE TEST!  Now that it is on the computer, and pretty much everything requires a written response, it is imperative that I teach the kids the skills they need to adequately convey their thoughts in written form. Today, I thought I would share with you my secret to success when it comes to writing.  Are you ready?  Ok...here it goes. We write every day. Yep, that is it.  We write.  All the time.  Every day.  Even for homework.  The kids are constantly writing and formulating their thoughts coherently and with purpose.   Did you fall out of your chair at that secret revelation?  I thought not.  It really isn't a secret at all.  I read somewhere that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill.  Writing is no different.  If we don't give the kids th...
I have been working with my students on adding detail to their writing.  I don't know about you, but I find that when my kids write, they tend to leave out big chunks of the action either because a) they ran out of space on their paper or b) they see the mind movie but just don't think to translate that onto the paper for other people to "see".    So, in an effort to get the kids to add the details that are missing from their writing pieces, I have broken out some nursery rhymes to help. Nursery rhymes are high in fun rhyme, but low in details.  This makes sense though, since the purpose of nursery rhymes are to have small children remember them rather quickly.  However, because they don't have many details, each orator can create their own images of what is actually happening behind the scenes in the nursery rhyme, giving way to lots and lots of interpretations.  One of the more well known rhymes, that has some random interpretations, is Humpty Dumpty (hello, a...
Our Explorer unit is in full swing now and things are moving along quite nicely.  After a brief oral retelling by me about how the  world was, for all intents and purposes, two separate entities, since the oceans kept the two major hemispheres apart, we launched into a reading about the various reasons why the early European explorers decided to explore in the first place. Now, each year I do this with the students and, in the past, I had the students create a little flipbook of those reasons (I wrote about it here in this post). This year, I took a little different approach.  We talked about how there are three main categories that historians have classified European desire to explore -- God, Glory, and Gold. I gave the students this article which outlined these three reasons   fairly well. (but be forewarned.  This article came from a homeschooling blog and it a bit religious.  I had to do some cutting and pasting of a few of the paragraphs before I gave it to my students.  Thi...