Wednesday, November 03, 2010

How homeschoolers do things: period.

I was pleased with Crayons' written narration of Dryope, but I did notice that her sentences and punctuation need some work.

Well, as Ruth Beechick said, find out what they don't know and teach that.

Today's English lesson:  three separate paragraphs copied from an online edition of The Secret Garden.  I copied each paragraph into a Word file twice, and then mucked up one copy of each, leaving out periods, erasing capitals and quotation marks.  I printed them out and gave them to Crayons for "editing."  After she had a go at the first one, we compared it with the original.  Oops--missed a few sentence breaks, but not too bad.  She did the same with the other two paragraphs.  I pointed out that there was one place where I might have broken a sentence in two but where the author kept it as one long sentence; that there's often room for individual choice.

I'm planning on having Crayons continue to work on this for awhile.  However, I did notice that a written narration she did later on showed much more attention to periods! (maybe too much, but we'll work on that)

JACK AND JILL, by Crayons
(from Jack and Jill, by Louisa May Alcott, chapter 7)

One day Jack and Jill were working in Jack's stamp book.  Then Frank came in.  "Jack when are you going to do your latin." he said.  "I dunno" Jack said.  Frank became angry he grabbed Jack's stamps.  "I'm not giving them back till you do your latin."  He said.  "ERRRRR" shouted Jack.

1 comment:

Marlis said...

Awesome idea! Thank you. I'll definitely be incorporating this idea in our curriculum and sharing it.