Hey all!
It's been a busy week here.
It's been a busy week here.
Meetings and parent teacher conferences have me making it just through one day and into the next.
I thought I'd post today about a current activity that we are working on in class.
Grammar Skills!
Grammar is tough for my 8th graders.
I think grammar went by the wayside for a few years, so now my kids are clueless.
Bless their hearts, but they don't even know how to identify a subject and a verb.
We have been working hard at it, but Rome wasn't built in a day.
I really feel I would be doing them a disservice if I just glossed over it and let it go, so I'm trying to change it a little at a time.
Each time I grade an essay of a students, I grade based on the current rubric that I gave them, but I also look for one main grammar error.
I find it best if I give them one thing to work on at a time.
Then, we use No Red Ink to learn the rules for their current goal.
The thing I love about No Red Ink is it has personalized interactive practice.
It allows students to choose their interests, and then they actually get to drag and pull commas, semicolons, colons, etc to various places in a sentence.
Right now I have 14 different skills being learned throughout all four of my classes.
I might only have one or two students working on a skill in all of my classes, but if I see a skill that a student needs, I assign it.
For my higher kids we are working through using semicolons and colons and using commas and coordinating conjunctions.
This is tough.
At the end of this week I will specifically be assessing how the students learned their individual writing goal in their own writing.
Sometimes it's difficult to get the skill that they learned online to transfer and use it correctly in their own writing.
My fingers are crossed, and I'm hoping it WILL transfer on Friday.
For any other teachers out there, what grammar work do you use?
There's just no way I could make lessons for all of the skills that my students need.
The best thing I've found it No Red Ink.
It's not perfect, but it's the best I've yet to find.
Happy Thursday!
Grammar is tough for my 8th graders.
I think grammar went by the wayside for a few years, so now my kids are clueless.
Bless their hearts, but they don't even know how to identify a subject and a verb.
We have been working hard at it, but Rome wasn't built in a day.
I really feel I would be doing them a disservice if I just glossed over it and let it go, so I'm trying to change it a little at a time.
Each time I grade an essay of a students, I grade based on the current rubric that I gave them, but I also look for one main grammar error.
I find it best if I give them one thing to work on at a time.
Then, we use No Red Ink to learn the rules for their current goal.
Here is their No Red Ink Tracker paper where they list the skill they were assigned, the date they completed the practice and mark off once they completed the quiz.
An example of what the interactive practice looks like...
The thing I love about No Red Ink is it has personalized interactive practice.
It allows students to choose their interests, and then they actually get to drag and pull commas, semicolons, colons, etc to various places in a sentence.
Right now I have 14 different skills being learned throughout all four of my classes.
I might only have one or two students working on a skill in all of my classes, but if I see a skill that a student needs, I assign it.
For my higher kids we are working through using semicolons and colons and using commas and coordinating conjunctions.
This is tough.
At the end of this week I will specifically be assessing how the students learned their individual writing goal in their own writing.
Sometimes it's difficult to get the skill that they learned online to transfer and use it correctly in their own writing.
My fingers are crossed, and I'm hoping it WILL transfer on Friday.
For any other teachers out there, what grammar work do you use?
There's just no way I could make lessons for all of the skills that my students need.
The best thing I've found it No Red Ink.
It's not perfect, but it's the best I've yet to find.
Happy Thursday!
I really like this idea!!! I wish more teachers were like you.
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