In a message dated 12/9/2000 3:49:17 PM Pacific Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< It would also be useful to include specific examples where there are none
 -- in spare time, of course.:)

 judy

  [The ideal would be to build up enough concrete instances for teachers to
 'get' the principle at work and so be able to design examples of their
 own...=-- an online grammar course? >>

Judy,

Several teachers who lurk on this list and I have been talking about starting
a list specifically for sharing concrete teaching ideas about grammar for
middle school and lower.  NCTE has agreed to host it, but maybe we don't need
it.  I can throw together a web page to store ideas if people want to
contribute through ATEG.  (Or maybe I'm asking the wrong question.  Is there
an ATEG list for elementary and middle school teachers?)

For example, my focus this month in writing workshop has been commas.  I keep
finding, however, that my sixth graders can't recognize some of the
structures that require commas in their own writing.  The difference between
two independent clauses (however you define them!) joined by a conjunction
and a sentence with a compound verb seems to be as big a mystery as it was
before we started.  And before anyone asks, no - I didn't use worksheets
(well, okay.  I did make up an overhead with sentences from their writing!).

We've "done" chunking, and sentence imitating, and sentence rearranging
(mostly with sentences from their novels - the current one is _Beowulf_), and
I'm about to go to sentence combining to see if that helps.  But they don't
SEE the different sentence structures.

Should I be "doing" sentence patterns?  How does one do that within the
context of their writing?

Any concrete tips for me?

Gretchen in San Jose
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