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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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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