Dave, et al.,
I used Don and Jenny Killgallon's text Grammar for Middle School, among other things. For each of thirteen sentence modifiers (opening adjective, delayed adjective, opening adverb, delayed adverb, absolute phrase, appositive phrase, prepositional phrase, participial phrase, gerund phrase, infinitive phrase, adjective clause, adverb clause, noun clause), the students first examine several example sentences drawn (as are all the examples) from authors popular with middle schoolers (J.R.R. Tolkein, Harper Lee, Arthur Conan Doyle, Hal Borland, Pat Conroy, J.K. Rowling, for example). I have my students memorize these sentences long enough to recite them without looking. I think this is a crucial step. They then match examples of the construction with the sentences from which they were extracted. They usually work in pair on this and write their answers on personal white boards. They then write the sentences (five of
them), properly reconstructed, from memory, on their white boards. Next, they unscramble a sentence to match the model of the original. I have them write both the original, the unscrambled sentence, and their own imitation of the original on their whiteboards. After that, they do a sentence combining exercise where they write the original, the combined version, and their own original sentence on that model. Then they imitate three example sentences by writing the example, the model provided, and their own imitation sentence. The last practice is sentence expanding with three sentences, taking an example sentence and adding the modifier at the caret. With each of the sentence modifier chapters, there is a creative writing exercise where the students either chose one of three given first sentences and add the rest of the first paragraph, trying to use the modifiers they have learned, or they are given an opening paragraph with
missing modifiers to insert. After they have completed a chapter, they have written the modifier, in a well-constructed sentence, somewhere around 25 times. Each of these sentences was read by their teacher and immediately verified as correct, even good, or they were told how to make it better. This is possible by having students hold up their whiteboards when they have written their sentences. These exercises are spread out over about three days, about twenty minutes per day.
I have also used other materials with similar methods, mostly using imitation. For example, I taught them to use tricolon, parallelism, chiasmus, antithesis, anaphora, and several other rhetorical devices.
From: David Kehe <[log in to unmask]> |
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