10/9/09

 Killing Two Birds With One Stone

Are you using my “Killing Two Birds With One Stone” approach with Word Web Vocabulary lessons? It’s an easy way to review and strengthen your students’ mastery of the following:

• mechanics: Capitalization, punctuation (especially of dialogue), apostrophes?
  
• spelling demons as shown in lessons 10-36 in each vocabulary volume?
  
• sentence types: Declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory?
  
• simple, compound, complex, compound-complex sentences, making sure students avoid run-on and incomplete sentences?
  
• sentences whose subject and verb are in agreement?
  
• parts of speech: Nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs?
  
• use of the active voice, rather than passive, in their sentences?
  
• pronouns: Correct usage of first and third person, agreement of pronouns and antecedents?
  
• prepositions (to, by, under, before and hundreds more): Students should recognize these words which shows relationships among other words in the sentence. prepositional phrases: (in the house, on the floor). There are two reasons why students should pay attention to these. One is so that students can recognize them when diagramming sentences; the other is to make sure that they do not end a sentence with a prepositional phrase, as in “Tell me what road you came on.” “What must I thank her for?”
• clauses and phrases: Introductory, subordinate, interrupting and misplaced; dangling modifiers?
  
• types of writing: Narrative, expository, descriptive, persuasive?
  
• literary techniques: Alliteration, metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, onomatopoeia? 
  
• confusing homonyms and word forms: Its - it’s; to, too, two; their, there, they’re; whose- who’s; who - whom;  whoever - whomever; lie - lay; woman - women and other irregular plurals?
  
• confusing pairs: choose - chose; clothes - cloths; desert - dessert; effect - affect; loose - lose; principal - principle, etc.

If you’re not already doing so, please begin! I designed Word Web so that you could find an easy method to review these important mechanics of writing.

That’s my Word for this time.

Ellie

Word Web Vocabulary - recommended on Heidi Hayes-Jacobs' website - Moving vocabulary from the edge of language arts to its center