Our Homeschool History

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode, I teach a skill that many writing teachers shy away from: quotation marks. If we want students to write well, they need to learn how to put quotes in their papers---and how to properly punctuate with quotation marks and capitalization. Quotations are not for the faint of heart. Thus, many teachers will skip them as often as possible—and students will skip them altogether if they can get away with not using quotations.

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode (second part of Twice-Told Tale!) It’s time to look at the second part of this Twice Told Tale lesson---The Emperor’s New Clothes. This fool-proof story writing technique takes even non-story writers by the hand to create an amazing finished product that they are super proud of!

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode (and the next---two parter!), I have a blast teaching about a story writing technique that I came up with years ago (I’m sure others thought of it too!) called the Twice-Told Tale. (Some of my early books call it The Piggyback Story.) This fool-proof story writing technique takes even non-story writers by the hand to create an amazing finished product that they are super proud of!

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode, I geek out on ways to order parts of speech teaching (and whether there are 8, 10, 12, or more parts of speech!) and I give tips on how to teach articles/noun markers. Grammarians, handbook authors, and style guides often disagree on the ways to order parts of speech. Which part of speech should come first? How do you build from one part of speech to the next? What should the timing be in the order of parts of speech?

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach...In episode #20, I explain how to choose a passage to give your students as a writing source. Moreover, I explain what a writing source should look like for your students---from the number of paragraphs to the complexity of the sentences, from the outlining spaces to the symbols a student can use in their outlines.

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In episode #19, I teach how to use a weekly (or daily!) grammar quiz as part of your language arts study. An ongoing grammar quiz in which students easily and incrementally memorize important grammar terms is the answer that I have found to that age-old problem of “What are prepositions again” every time students have a grammar worksheet finding all of the prepositions!

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Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher's Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode, I continue teaching about using a checklist for revising reports, essays, and stories---including how to teach students to code their edits and changes for quick and thorough grading. I do this with a systematic revising approach that becomes habitual for students and is measurable for the teacher.  

With my Checklist Challenge for revising writing, students are taught exactly what to do and how to mark changes so their teacher can grade their “colorful copy”—as we like to call it in my classes. This week we continued with the “Elves and the Shoemaker” paper and how to revise it using the following:

• Thesis Statement

I also explained how to make a checklist easier for younger students (second or third graders) and more challenging for older students (up through high school).

In all of my How To Lessons (found in all first semester Meaningful Composition books up through grade nine and all month-long downloadable books in the Tools and Tricks line), students are taught how to do each revising task one at a time with a color-coded sample to follow as they make changes to a given essay (or their own). Each CC task is introduced on a separate page and thoroughly taught.

In this episode of HIT, you will find a full How to CC lessons (in your last week’s episode here.

Of course, just like every lesson in my one-month downloadable books and my one-semester Meaningful Composition books, this one also has the invaluable samples to take the guess work out of the lessons!

And for your convenience, How I Teach.... is available as a podcast (follow along in your TN sheets for that week) and a YouTube video (with Power Point containing the same as the TN)! 

Note: This lesson came from Tools and Tricks II, a month-long, downloadable book from the Write-for-a-Month series.

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In this episode, I introduce you to my Checklist Challenge (CC)  for revising reports, essays, and stories---including how to teach students to code their edits and changes for quick and thorough grading. Revising can be a difficult task for students, mostly because they are not taught how to do it thoroughly. Vague instructions, such as “add stronger verbs some places” or “don’t forget a Thesis Statement,” do not help students with the revising process.

With my Checklist Challenge for revising writing, students are taught exactly what to do and how to mark changes so their teacher can grade their “colorful copy”—as we like to call it in my classes. They are given samples of each usage addition they are to make (not just a list, such as add adjectives or add coordinating conjunctions).

Specifically, in my How To Lessons (found in all first semester Meaningful Composition books up through grade nine and all month-long downloadable books in the Tools and Tricks line), students are taught how to do each revising task one at a time with a color-coded sample to follow as they make changes to a given essay (or their own). Each CC task is introduced on a separate page and thoroughly taught.

In this episode of HIT, you will find a full How to CC lessons (in your Teacher’s Notebook) for third graders through ninth graders. I will teach you exactly to teach your students to thoroughly improve their papers with a clear-cut checklist—and how to teach them to “code” them so that you can find the changes that they make in their papers.

This is the exact protocol I use with all 50-60 of my writing and language arts students every year---and it works wonderfully and turns out amazing writers and revisers! This is part I of a two part HIT lesson, so be sure to join me next week for more!

Of course, just like every lesson in my one-month downloadable books and my one-semester Meaningful Composition books, this one also has the invaluable samples to take the guess work out of the lessons!

And for your convenience, How I Teach.... is available as a podcast (follow along in your TN sheets for that week) and a Youtube video (with Power Point containing the same as the TN)! 

Note: This lesson came from Tools and Tricks II, a month-long, downloadable book from the Write-for-a-Month series.

Find everything you need here!

Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In episode #16, I am excited (again!) to teach you about how I teach a very beginning report (moving from essay to report) for elementary students. In teaching beginning report writing, it is important that we don’t have too many new skills at  once. Elementary report writing can be daunting. Students at this age (and later) often want to “write from their brains.” How can we get them from writing only what they already know about to writing with information they gather on their own?

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Welcome to HIT---How I Teach....In episode #15, I am thrilled to bring you some insights in to how to teach descriptive writing for middle school (and on into high school!) students. Specifically, I teach how I teach students to write descriptive paragraphs about their first few minutes in a jungle. And even more specifically, how to write descriptively using all five senses.

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