Day 6: #SOL16- Sentences With Double Meanings

The Slice of Life Challenge is hosted by the inspirational writers of Two Writing Teachers. Each March, they invite people to join them in a commitment to write every day. Here's to another year of daily slicing!

I'm still celebrating National Grammar Day which was on March 4th--the only calendar day of the year that is also a command. I posted a slice about it yesterday. 

With grammar on my mind, I had a long drive with my daughter Julia, who is a high school senior. She was a captive audience for me, as I was trying to think of sentences that could have double meanings along the lines of March 4th/ march forth. Julia knows the classic missing comma example: Let's eat, Grandma/ Let's eat Grandma, so she caught on quickly. 

We came up with:
Will he read the whole book?/ Will, he read the whole book!
Mom is their dinner./ Mom, is there dinner?
Where are pants from my brother?/ Wear our pants from my brother!

If anyone could come up with more, please include double meaning sentences in the comments. I'm looking to build a collection!

Happy Sunday!

Day 5- #SOL16: I Missed National Grammar Day!

The Slice of Life Challenge is hosted by the inspirational writers of Two Writing Teachers. Each March, they invite people to join them in a commitment to write every day. Here's to another year of daily slicing!

I'm a little disappointed because I learned that today is National Grammar Day too late! (Disclaimer: As I write this post, it is March 4th. Not March 5th.) You can read more about National Grammar Day here. I found out about through some favorite twitter friends. There are some very funny tweets to be found using the #GrammarDay hashtag.

One of my favorite nerdy pastimes is thinking about how to teach grammar in meaningful, engaging, and even funny ways. As someone pointed out on Twitter, March Fourth is the only day of the year that is a command. Think of the teaching possibilities that lie within the Common Core Language Standards:

Homophones and frequently misused words: Look at what happens when we remove the "u". The date become a command, just like that.  It's not quite as impactful and important as the comma in Let's eat, Grandma, but one letter really makes a difference.

Commas in Dates: Today, March 4, 2016, would have been a perfect day to review the comma that belongs after the 4, because students would have been intrigued to think about why we should march forth on March 4, 2016.

Capitalization of months: No capital needed if the command is to march forth, but you better have a capital M if you are talking about March 4th.

I definitely need to remember to celebrate March 4, 2017. It's a day to mark on the calendar with as much enthusiasm for linguists as Pi Day (3/14) is marked for mathematicians.

Maybe we can have a missed March Forth Day on March 7!

Cheers,

Slice of Life: Play and Grammar

Thanks to Stacey, Dana, Tara, Betsy, Anna, and Beth, the amazing writers and thinkers who host the Slice of Life community every Tuesday. Everyone is welcome to join with posts or comments at twowritingteachers.wordpress.com!

One of the challenges of my year is rethinking and redeveloping our grammar curriculum. I have read many great books on the subject--The Power of Grammar  and Grammar Matters remain at the top of my list for anyone looking for elementary-geared recommendations-and yesterday, with the snow storm, I started writing some of the lessons we will fold into units.

As I watched the UConn women play South Carolina (Go UConn! --they won, if anyone is interested), I perused websites for grammar games. My twelve year-old snuggled into me and coached me through a battleship game at http://www.quia.com/ba/144044.html?AP_rand=604647634. It definitely kept our attention and we had to practice our subject-verb agreement. We also went on a treasure hunt at http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/game/en30stru-game-verb-subject-treasure-hunt.   This website has many interactive games to capture the gaming spirits, and Cecily paid more attention to finding treasure than the layups and three-pointers happening on the television set. Cecily was less interested in the extensive array of lessons offered at learnzillion.com. I knew that learnzillion offered great math lessons, but I was not as aware of the resources available for writing and language. Wow! If you haven't registered, I highly recommend doing so and allotting time for exploration.

Play is such an important part of learning, and we have so many resources available during this age of access! The #caedchat was all about play last week--if you have time, read some of the tweets about the definition of play and the importance of it for learning. Also, don't miss Julieanne's post about the importance of play in lives and learning.

Happy Slicing!

Revising as Part of the Process

This is a post that I have started and changed several times. Ironically, this post is about revising and editing. As a writer, I revise constantly as I write. I hardly ever draft on paper anymore--most of my composing is through my fingertips-- and I would probably be stunned at how many times I hit the backspace key. (Full disclosure: I changed two words after I typed them in the last sentence so that the sentence would be clearer and not so repetitive. You can try to figure out the words. Maybe I'll share what they were at the end of this post...)

Melanie Swider and I have been talking about revision in the classroom and she shared an interesting conversation that she had with her students about their essay writing. "When did you revise your essays?" she asked her students. We were both happy that her students responded that they revised their essays throughout the whole process of drafting them. They made changes as they incorporated teaching points into their work and they fixed parts that were unclear when they re-read their drafts. Through their turn and talk, they realized that they also revise as they work in their notebooks, even when they are writing lists, plans, and entries. "Doesn't that count as revising?" one girl asked. Of course it does!

I worry when we teach students that revising and editing are separate steps in the writing process because I don't think that they are. When we write, we revise as we go. Sometimes, our revisions require asterisks, numbers, or arrows, but sometimes, they just involve a quick line through what we wrote first or a few clicks of the backspace button--okay, sometimes even a lot of clicks of the backspace button.The real message for students then becomes that writers re-read throughout their work and change as they go. Sometimes, they start with a plan and they veer; they make decisions to return to the plan or forge a new path that makes more sense. Sometimes, through re-reading, writers realize that they have been unclear, or that they have been redundant, or that they have missed an opportunity for parallel structure. Younger writers may realize that they could have included some punctuation, extra letters in some of their words, a capital letter, or spaces between some words. Are these separate steps if our writers continue their story or piece, having just made their corrections along the way?

I attended the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project workshop this week about their rethinking about their writing units for grades K-2. Natalie Louis, a staff developer for the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, shared that students will be expected to work through the process faster with increased expectations for productivity. "Revision," she said, "becomes no big deal. It's just a matter of course." To her point, writing more gives students more and more opportunities for revision--for trying out new learning and experimenting with different ways of self-expression. If we are asking students to produce quick writing and then return to those pieces to think about how they can try out new skills within them, then I can see how revision is a separate step. But, what if, on another go at a story, one of those young students tries out a strategy along the way and changes course to try out another strategy within the same piece? I'd celebrate because that student is demonstrating internalization of new strategies and has incorporated them into his/her own repertoire!

Sometimes when I am speaking, I announce that I am drafting. I'm not sure that you can really draft speech, but my thinking is that it lets people know that I'm not positive that I agree with the words that are coming out of my mouth; I might want to change them. One of the reasons that I love writing is because I have the power to change what I am writing ( I just did, as a matter of fact, make a change!). I have the power to re-read and make sure that I've made sense. I can add or subtract words and I can read my work to my husband or ask a friend to read my writing. And yes, I can do many of these steps as I'm drafting. I think that emphasizing to children the power that revision offers writers is so important to teach. That way, revision becomes not only a matter of course, but an avenue for constant reflection and improvement.

This post has taken a long time and a lot of revisions and I can't remember the two words I changed in the first paragraph, although I know that one of them was composing. ;)

Happy planning, drafting, revising, and reflecting!

Thoughts on Punctuation

The Common Core includes specific expectations about students' use of conventions in their writing. The fifth-grade language standard is:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.2 Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.2a Use punctuation to separate items in a series.*
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.2b Use a comma to separate an introductory element from the rest of the sentence.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.2c Use a comma to set off the words yes and no (e.g., Yes, thank you), to set off a tag question from the rest of the sentence (e.g., It’s true, isn’t it?), and to indicate direct address (e.g., Is that you, Steve?).
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.2d Use underlining, quotation marks, or italics to indicate titles of works.

While I’m sure that there are several ways to teach end punctuation, I have been reading Janet Angelillo’s  A Fresh Approach to Teaching Punctuation and loving the concept of teaching punctuation through an inquiry-based approach. Additionally, one of the teachers I visited this week had created a chart for her students about end punctuation. She created the chart during a mini-lesson, but used it as a reference tool to remind her students of their responsibility to include periods, question marks, and exclamation points. Her students recognize the chart as an important resource for them.

 I love Angelillo's statement that it is “better to display sentences from books and ask them (the students) to discuss why each sentence works.” (p. 55) As the district’s writing coordinator, I do not have access to my own classroom to use as a lab, but I do have four daughters and several nephews. Last weekend, we looked at I Want My Hat Back by Jan Classan and debated why there is no question mark used as end punctuation when the author writes “Why would you ask me that.” How could there be no question mark? Isn’t there a rule that when a sentence starts with why, it should have a question mark? How does it change the meaning of what the character is saying because of the end punctuation? Could I use this trick in my own writing and if I do, what would that look like? Such simple text inspired some pretty heavy thinking! “I had no idea this book could be so complicated,” my ten year-old said.

I'm looking for ways that others are integrating punctuation and grammar into their daily practices and writing workshops. Please feel free to share in the comments! (Exclamation point intended!)

Thoughts of Grammar Instruction

I grew up diagramming sentences. I still have my Warriner's English Grammar and Composition book from high school and I have unsuccessfully tried to teach my daughters how to diagram sentences. They will write with me during the summers and they want my suggestions on their papers, but they draw the line (pun intended) at diagramming sentences.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had several conversations with teachers in our district about how to teach grammar and punctuation to students. Some of these conversations have been driven by our districts standardized assessment scores; the Connecticut Mastery Test includes editing and revising strands and our district did not perform as strongly on the editing portion of the test as we did on the rest of the test. Other conversations have started because teachers find that many students don't include basic punctuation-- capital letters, periods, question marks-- in their writing drafts, even though we know that they have had prior instruction on these skills. Additionally, teachers are lamenting that students write in incomplete sentences with very little regard to parts speech, word variation, or sentence complexity.

Enter the Common Core...Some of the fifth-grade standards include:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.1 Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.

and

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.5.1a Explain the function of conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections in general and their function in particular sentences.

Between these conversations and the fact that the Common Core specifically addresses grammar, conventions, and punctuation, I have been reading and thinking a lot about how to inspire students to retain and use what we teach about grammar and punctuation. One of my new favorite books is Janet Angelillo's Grammar Study because I love her approach to teaching grammar through units of study and mentor texts. She believes that the purpose of grammar units should be “to introduce them to the fact that grammar makes language work and to make them curious about how it works.” (p. 23) Moving along, she also gives specific and explicit ideas for incorporating grammar into units of study. One of her ideas include choosing mentor texts that are good examples of the genre with the grammatical structures that you plan to teach. Her book is full of ideas for mini-lessons that are designed to inspire inquiry-based learning and curiosity. Instead of teaching from worksheets that contain sentence fragments, have students create charts of fragments from mentor texts and talk about why the author chose not to use a complete sentence. I'd love to see some of the scripts of those discussions. To specifically address the content standards cited above, what about creating charts that show how an author uses interjections in sentences? Then, brainstorm ideas about what those interjections add to the piece of writing.

I'm looking for ways that others are integrating punctuation and grammar into their daily practices and writing workshops. Please feel free to share in the comments!