I'm Writing "Grammar" and "Fun" in the Same Sentence

books:


	• EVERYDAY EDITING: Inviting Students to Develop Skill and Craft in Writer's Workshop Jeff Anderson Stenhouse Publishers, 2007 - 164 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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A must-have for every writing teacher

I would pay triple for this book! It is one of the best teaching resources I own, and I promise you will use it over and over again.

Think of this: Does a coach repeatedly show his athletes how NOT to perform a play? Does he swing the bat incorrectly over and over before asking his players to show him a perfect swing? Of course not! So why do so many writing teachers (including me - before I knew better) do the same thing? Anderson believes that we cannot give our students "worksheets riddled with errors" and ask them to take out commas or to add in semicolons. Instead, we should teach editing like a sport. In this book, Anderson does just that. He invites students to notice well-written mentor texts before letting kids take a swing.

The first section of the book is Anderson's rationale (backed by research) for why kids should be taught editing skills. Part two contains actual lessons you can immediately use in your classroom - no matter what grade you teach. Each lesson is set up with a series of invitations. The first student invitation is to notice powerful writing - to truly look at master writers and learn why they used specific punctuation marks. Once the students truly understand the grammatical concept, Anderson invites them to imitate master writers by combining sentences, editing, and writing.

I don't consider myself to be the greatest teacher ever, but Anderson's book is helping me become much better. This book truly gets kids to want to learn and master grammatical concepts. His lessons are genius, creative, and down-right fun! Kids love them. The invitations are created so teachers can praise students for what they have done right, rather than nagging them for what they've done wrong. (If you were the student, wouldn't this praise make you feel better as a writer?)

As Anderson states in his first book Mechanically Inclined, we should "Teach grammar and mechanics as a creational facility rather than a correctional one." Anderson uses this same philosophy in Everyday Editing. You will find Anderson's books to be extremely valuable to both you and your students.

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I'm Writing "Grammar" and "Fun" in the Same Sentence

Jeff Anderson's book offers lots of practical ideas for tweaking your writer's workshop and making your students better writers. He devotes chapters to various skills and how to teach them (serial commas, appositives, participles, etc.). One of his basic tenets is selecting good examples of sentences from your own readings of YA books, then using them as teaching tools by asking kids what they notice (it might be how appositives are punctuated, or how the colon introduces a list). The sentences interest the kids because they are taken from high interest books, and instead of learning from BAD sentences that are riddled with mistakes for correction, students learn from models that are free of mistakes (novel thought -- "mentor" sentences instead of "mental" ones).

You can find plenty of sentences to use in your own readings, but if you don't have time, Anderson provides examples for you in this book. He also devises sentence combining activities by "deconstructing" good mentor sentences and asking students to put them together again (where's Humpty Dumpty when you need him?). Again, great idea. Studies have proven that sentence combining is an effective teaching tool.

I just used Anderson's idea for creating an Appositive Book with separate flaps for the subject, the appositive, and the verb parts of the sentences and my students loved it. By raising different flaps in the partitioned book, they were able to create some amusing (OK, silly) sentences using appositives. It's stuff like this that makes stuff like grammar (the Teflon of our teaching chores) stick!

Recommendation: Buy. Then use. Frequently.

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