Explanation-
The following activities were created to improve students’ writing accuracy. Feel free to cut, paste, and tweak to fit your classes and activities. The rationale for using charts was to give my students a way to disseminate their blogs into sentences to identify their errors and make corrections. These handouts were given to the students as E-copies through email or Blackboard/Moodle to work on after they had posted their blogs.
1. Chart
A. Identifying 4 types of sentences- The purpose of this activity was to allow students to see if their sentences were a combination of the four types of sentences.
Directions-Cut and paste your sentences into the correct columns. Did you have a combination of all four types of sentences? Did you only write simple sentences and/or compound sentences? How many of your sentences were accurate? What kind of sentence do you need to work on? Make a mental note to improve on these areas.
Simple sentence | Compound sentence | Complex sentence | Compound-complex Sentence |
Sample:
B. Making corrections-The purpose was to have students identify and make corrections to their own mistakes. I would have the students work on cutting, pasting, and correcting their sentences, and then I would take them and highlight the ones that were still incorrect. The goal of the students was to receive their submissions without any highlights by the end of the semester.
Directions- Cut and paste each of your sentences into rows. Leave the correct sentences in the original sentence column; however, if they are grammatically incorrect, make corrections to them in the corrected sentence column. Remember, you want your paper returned to you without any highlighted sentences.
Original Sentence | Corrected Sentence |
Sample:
C. Identifying grammar errors- I wanted the students to see which errors they were consistently making.
Directions- Cut and paste your sentences into rows. Identify your errors. Find the grammar rule for it. Make corrections to your original sentence.
Original sentence | Grammar error | Grammar rule | Corrected sentence |
D. Parts of a paragraph- The reason for this activity is for students to make sure their paragraphs have the parts of a paragraph-topic sentence, supporting sentences, and concluding sentence.
Topic sentence | |
Supporting sentences | |
Concluding sentence |
Sample:
2. Questions and Answers-The rationale is to get students to read others’ blogs with a focus. The teacher can create a handout with questions from the blogs or students can come up with questions for each blog. Multiple variations are possible.
A. Teacher generates questions after reading the blogs
A. Teacher generates questions after reading the blogs
Add cultural blog questions
Sample:
B. Students generate questions after reading the blogs Sample:
3. Prewriting activities for essay writing
A. Journal writing
B. Free-writing
