5 Things Your Students Won't Tell You

Have you ever wondered what your students think about you? 

Here are a few possibilities:

1.  Your breath is not fresh.

If you are engaged and interacting with your students, you will often lean in close to them to offer advice or encouragement. Be sure the tuna sandwich and ranch dressing chips you had for lunch do not offend. Keep some breath mints in your desk, pop one in your mouth, and keep your breath fresh. ( I can still remember my 6th grade teacher's offensive breath. Seriously? After all these years, you'd think I could forget.)

2.  Your voice is unpleasant.

Record your lessons for a few days and listen to the sound of your own voice. Are you too loud? Do you speak in a monotone? Do your words produce a singsong pattern? If so, practice making your voice more pleasant. 

3.  Your instructions are not clear.

Do your students ask you several questions before they begin to work? Are the questions ones that were already addressed in your instructions? If so, perhaps the wording in your instructions is not as clear as it could be. Anticipate the questions (even if they seem trivial) your students might ask , and include that information in your instructions.

5.  Your focus is not what it should be.

Are students cheating? Are they visiting and socializing when they should be working independently? If so, examine what you are doing. Are you walking around the room and interacting with your students, or are you typing on your computer or iPad, checking your email, or grading papers? Focus on the students who are acting out. Leave everything else until later. They will soon realize that you are aware of their actions, and they will get to work.

It is entirely possible that your students have never thought these things about you, but it helps to be aware of the possibility that one of these might be something you could improve upon.

Be sure to visit my two stores. TeachersPayTeachers and Teachers Notebook

I have all of my products on sale for Teacher Appreciation Week.

I do appreciate teachers both past and present. 

All the best,

Bloopers from FaceBook

We all make mistakes, and I am certainly not the FaceBook Police, but after seeing these bloopers, I thought these errors would make a good topic for a post. Here are just a few of some common errors that appeared on Facebook recently and some information on how to write them correctly.

“Who remember's this?”

Do not use an apostrophe to make a noun plural.

Correction: Who remembers this?

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 "The dog is microchipped in case she would loose her collar."

Loose means not tight. Lose means to misplace.

Correction: The dog is microchipped in case she would lose her collar.

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" I laid down for 5 minutes and woke up 2 hours later."

Laid means to put or to place something.

Correction: I lay down for 5 minutes and woke up 2 hours later.

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 “I think that Mom's who watch soap operas are way two dramatic.”

There are three errors in this sentence.

Do not use an apostrophe to make a noun plural.

Do not capitalize words that name relationships unless that word is replacing their name.

The word  two means 2. The word  too means to an excessive degree.

Three corrections: I think that moms who watch soap operas are way too dramatic.

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 “I was just laying around feeling sick all week.”

The past progressive tense of the verb “lie” is was lying. “Laying” means to put or to place.

Correction: I was just lying around feeling sick all week.

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“George is a very healthful person.”

Healthy and healthful are adjectives that can be used as synonyms for each other unless one is talking about a person. 

Spinach can be a healthy or a healthful vegetable, but when talking about a person, always use “healthy.”

Correction: George is a very healthy person.

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For more practice with apostrophes and verbs, visit my store for some helpful exercises. Some of them are FREE.

Click here to read an earlier blog post that will help with using an apostrophe correctly.

Have a great day!

When to Use a Colon

A colon is a very useful punctuation mark that has only a only a few specific uses.

Be sure to have a good reason when you use one in your writing. 

Use a colon:

• To separate hours from minutes (2:30) and show ratios (5:1)

• To punctuate the greeting in a business letter (Dear Madam:)

• To separate chapter from verse in the Bible (John 3:16)

• To join two independent clauses, if you wish to place emphasis on the second clause. (Use this one sparingly. It is easy to get it wrong.)

• At the end of an independent clause to show that a list, an appositive or a quotation is to follow.

For more practice with punctuation visit my store and click on the Punctuation, Capitalization, and Usage Skills Computer Quiz.  This quiz is a quick 20 sentence review or tutorial of the proofreading skills that are tested on many standardized tests. This quiz requires minimal teacher involvement. 



Have a great day!

When to Use “Who," "That," and "Which"

Here are a few simple hints to help you decide whether to use “who,” “that,” or “which” in the  sentences that you write.

Use “who” when referring to people.

For example: The employee who answered my questions was very polite.

Use "that" for clauses that define something specific and provide necessary information.

For example: The pie that I made today was tart. (You are talking about a specific pie.)

Use "which" for clauses that can be removed without changing the meaning of the sentence.The movie, which I saw yesterday, was about a war hero. 

Clauses that begin with “which” can be placed between commas or in parentheses.

Click on the button below to visit my store to see my products and lessons on grammar and usage.

All the best,

Simple Steps to Sentence Sense Videos

Has it been a long time since you sat through English 101 in college? 

Do you need help with analyzing English sentences? 

Maybe you are just learning English for the first time, or you are taking a foreign language that requires you to know sentence structure. Whatever the reason, if you feel a little uncomfortable about analyzing the structure of an English sentence or about writing well-constructed sentences of your own, I can help you. 

Grammar is my specialty. I have always loved taking sentences apart and putting them back together, and I taught my students how to do if for over three decades.

If you need help (or your students, children, or grandchildren do), I have exactly what you need. I have recently uploaded a series of videos that will guide you through the 8 steps of the Simple Steps to Sentence Sense series. The videos are short and easy to understand, and best of all FREE!

You can use them with students who enroll late in the year, with students who need tutoring, or you could let the videos do the teaching for you. Just make copies of the notes from my book and give each student a copy. Then play the video for them, sit back, and let me explain the step.

After you watch them, if you want to practice what you have learned or learn even more, just visit my store.

Click on the links below to watch the videos:

Step One - Prepositional Phrases

Step Two - Verb

Step Three - Subject

Step Four - Part 1 Action Verb Complements

Step Four - Part 2 Linking Verb Complements

Step Five - Adjectives and Adverbs

Step Six - Phrases

Step Seven - Clauses

Step Eight - Classifying Sentences 

Enjoy!

5 WAYS TO CREATE A LESSON PLAN YOUR STUDENTS WILL LOVE

Here are 5 ways to create a lesson plan your students will love:

1. Make them laugh.
2. Promise them a good grade.
3. Tie the lesson into modern culture.
4. Let them talk to each other.
5. Let them move around the room.

Here's a chance for your students to do something they will really enjoy while practicing several valuable skills such as critical reading, critical writing, editing, proofreading, and cooperative learning. Students will work in groups to create newspapers based on nursery rhymes. They will have so much fun being creative and clever and it will not seem like work at all.

You can find it here 

or here.

All the best,

Old Plots Can Be New Again

Some say there are only three types of plots:

The happy ending, the unhappy ending, and the classical Greek tragic ending in which events are controlled by fate.

There are many variations on these three plots, of course, and plots are always controlled by the conflict between the characters. 

Remember these conflicts from your high school literature classes?

character vs character

character vs nature

character vs the environment

character vs machine

character vs the supernatural

character vs self

character vs religion

The point? It is not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Coming up with a new plot that has never been written is improbable. So, take a cue from many modern writers and rework a plot from a story or a movie. 

There are many examples of plots that have been reworked. For example,  Romeo and Juliet reworked as West Side Story and the typical spaghetti western novel reworked as Star Wars. 

If you have trouble coming up with an idea, just remember some of the classic plots and start changing things.

• Change the setting.

• Change the point-of-view. Tell the story through the mind of a different character than in the original story. 

• Choose a classic plot and bring it into the modern age. Choose a fairy tale, an epic poem, a classic novel, a Bible story, or a myth. 

• Take the conflict from a novel or play or movie and change everything else. (Change characters, point-of-view, plot, setting, etc.)

You cannot copyright an idea, so as long as you base your writing on a plot and then make it your own using your own words, you will not be plagiarizing.

So, don't take too much time reinventing the wheel. Just borrow and rework old plots!

Visit my store  for more writing tips and lessons.