Category: Language Arts: Writing

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Grammar Practice Sheets: Apostrophes, Quotation Marks and Underlining (and others)

We tend to switch back and forth between our spelling program and our grammar work.  This past week we worked on grammar and I made a few more sheets that paralleled the topics that were covered in our Write Source Skills Book (here’s a link to Grade 2 and Grade 4).  If you’re interested you can download the worksheets I made for the kids. They cover the use of apostrophes, quotation...

Grammar Games (online) 0

Grammar Games (online)

If your child needs to review some grammar rules, here are a few online games he/she can play: Magical Capitals: Help the fairy find all the words that should be capitalized. Comma Chameleon: Help the chameleon punctuate sentences. Blown Away: Determine which letter in the sentence should be capitalized. Beat the Clock: Apostrophe practice. Rewrite the sentence by adding an apostrophe and/or s. Play your Caps Right: Find the words...

What Should the Kids Be Learning? 1

What Should the Kids Be Learning?

I think we all worry a lot about what our kids need to know right now. What skills should they have? Can they do what they’re supposed to in fill-in-the-blank subject? We’re currently working on lots of stuff — math, spelling, physics, critical thinking, writing skills, music, but ultimately what is important that they remember and know from *this* day or *this* week? What do I want my kids to learn?...

Language Arts 0

Language Arts

Sometimes this doesn’t make as interesting material for a blog post, but we do cover grammar and language arts in addition to All About Spelling (we love, love love this program and it deserves its own post sometime), writing (we often use the Teacher Filebox for this), and First Language Lessons.  For basic rules of grammar we use the Write Source Skillsbook as our core (more about that below). We...

Handwriting Practice 0

Handwriting Practice

It has been a long time since I’ve written about the kids’ handwriting work.  I started LD off on Handwriting Without Tears “Cursive Handwriting” when he was in first grade. This helped with his tendency to mix up his “b” and “d” letters. His writing is really quite nice now. He actually uses a combination of cursive and printing, but his writing is neat and legible.   DD started Handwriting...

Cute Writing Paper 0

Cute Writing Paper

I’ve been printing out our own customized writing paper for DD when she does her spelling and narration work.  She loves this paper and you can choose from all kinds of themes (animals, holidays, seasons, cartoon characters and more). You can also choose the size of the writing paper (from larger lines for beginner writers to standard rule for more seasoned writers).  Anyway, since we get SO much use out...

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Build-A-Sentence Creative Writing Pack

Over the weekend, I made a set of Build_A_Sentence-Creative-Writing-Pack    for my first-grader. Build_A_Sentence Creative Writing Activity Here are my plans for them: The first couple of pages are filled with ideas.  She’ll go through and create sentences (silly or not) to write in her journal. Next we’ll work together to brainstorm ideas for some of the other themed sheets. I made about twenty different themed sheets with topics such as friendship, aliens,...

Writing: Super Sentences 0

Writing: Super Sentences

In collection (our morning group time) we talked about building super sentences. I used some materials I got from the Teacher Filebox (a subscription site that gives you access to most of the Evan Moor books from writing and reading to science and history).  This was a great activity for DD and good review for LD (ages 6 and 8). First we looked at a simple sentence.     The frog hopped.Then...

Spooky Science, Monster Writing 4

Spooky Science, Monster Writing

We had such a great homeschooling day on Monday. I was skeptical we’d get into the groove since we had just had my niece and nephew with us for four days. I brought in some spooky schooling, though and we had a terrific day! I went out and bought some dry ice and we did a number of experiments. You can see suggestions from Steve Spangler science and a couple...

Long A Words — Worksheet 0

Long A Words — Worksheet

Long a Words — Spelling Practice SentencesWe have gone over the long a words such as a (able, acorn) ai (sail, maid) a–e (cake, mate) ay (day) eigh (weigh, neighbor)ea (steak, break) ey (they) aigh (straight). This sheet uses these long a words in a sentence. They should be able to figure out the word by context, but if not you can tell them the word to write. Click herefor...

Writing a Novel — Elementary 0

Writing a Novel — Elementary

Last year my sister’s three homeschooled kids each wrote a novel. I hope to get a chance to read their work when we visit them. Her kids are 8, 11 and 13. Amazing! It’s not yet our season for writing things like that, but someone in one of the groups I visit shared this link for kids who plan to write their first novel.  Here is the elementary “Young Novelist”...

Word Family Activity 10

Shamrock- Spelling, Word Family Sort

Confession Time: One thing that I have not done well these past couple of years is to include activities that show word family patterns.  Both LD and DD learned to read easily and early.  Once they were off and reading, I guess I never saw much “point” in going over these kinds of things. But then… then I saw LD struggle as a writer. He has worked hard on the...