Writing Toolbox: What are correlative conjunctions?

Writing Toolbox: What are correlative conjunctions?

Having the right tools in your writing toolbox can make all the difference when it comes time to revise a composition. Do your students need a creative way to link ideas and show association? Then look no further than the correlative conjunction! First, let's look at this simple definition:

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FREE Grammar Jingles from Shurley English

FREE Grammar Jingles from Shurley English

Are you ready for a fun, easy, and FREE way to teach the eight parts of speech and other key language arts skills? Let us introduce you to Shurley English Jingles! Using domain-specific language, our definitions for the parts of speech and many other important language arts concepts incorporate rhythm, rhyme, and movement. Jingles provide the tools for critical thinking during sentence analysis and writing.  

Our multi-sensory approach provides an active, hands-on learning environment in which kids truly understand and retain language arts skills for a lifetime. (We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again. Jingles are an extremely effective way to learn information!) We invite you to incorporate Jingle Time into your ELA studies today! Getting started is easy…

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Writing Toolbox: Strategies for building better sentences

Writing Toolbox: Strategies for building better sentences

Whether you teach language arts in the school classroom or your home classroom, you have to teach your kids how to write, right? To be clear, I don’t mean the mechanical parts of writing: holding the pencil correctly, positioning the notebook paper properly, and so on. I mean the actual generation of topics that kids know about and want to write about. I mean the composition of clear, concise sentences that convey what the writer is thinking. It would be nice if kids were natural writers and could pluck ideas (and the words needed to express those ideas) out of their brains at the first sign of a prompt, but most of the time, this is not the case.

What kid writers need is

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Micro-comprehension: Sentence Structure Processing

Micro-comprehension: Sentence Structure Processing

In this series about developing micro-comprehension I have discussed how students need a good vocabulary in order to create accurate mental models of the stories they read or hear. We also know that those mental models are affected by the way the brain fills-in missing information, called gap-filling inference. Next up is sentence structure processing.

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Spring Bulletin Board: See how we've grown!

Spring Bulletin Board: See how we've grown!

It’s not always easy to see how much we’ve grown in one year, especially for a child. Physical growth might be the most noticeable because we can feel it in several ways. For instance, we can tell when our clothes are too big or too small; they don’t fit right. We know when our feet have grown because our shoes are too tight, and our feet hurt. Also, we can tell when our hair has grown when it starts covering our eyes and ears. Intellectual growth, on the other hand, is much more difficult to notice.

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