by Sharon Watson | Apr 19, 2015 | High School Prompts, High School Tutorial, Middle School Prompts, Middle School Tutorial, Sharon's Blog, teaching aids, tutorial, Writing Prompts
April is National Poetry Month. What a wonderful time to try your hand at writing a poem!
Haiku (high KOO) is a beautiful poem form that comes from Japan. It is usually about nature and can be spoken in one breath.
Syllables are important in a haiku. Words can be broken into parts based on their vowel sounds. Those parts are syllables. Tree has one syllable. Forest has two. And timberland has three. When you speak these words out loud, you can hear their syllables.
Haiku poems have another feature: They do not rhyme. (more…)
by Sharon Watson | Mar 22, 2015 | High School Prompts, High School Tutorial, Sharon's Blog, teaching aids, tutorial, Writing Prompts
SHARON’S BLOG
I love to bring you examples of effective writing so your students can use them, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of the U. S. Congress is an excellent example of persuasive writing. He used many powerful strategies in his speech, five of which we’ll delve into today.
Your students will better understand the intricacies of writing when they have the chance to learn from professional examples of published authors and speechmakers, so, to that end, let’s explore the persuasion tactics Netanyahu used.
Below are five powerful persuasion techniques. After the list, you’ll find a family writing prompt that involves one of them.
To read the complete transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, click here. .
(more…)
by Sharon Watson | Mar 22, 2015 | High School Prompts, High School Tutorial, Middle School Prompts, Middle School Tutorial, Sharon's Blog, teaching aids, tutorial, Writing Prompts
You are familiar with topic sentences, how they come at the beginning of paragraphs and tell readers what the paragraph is all about.
But what if the topic sentence came at the end of the paragraph? And what if that paragraph described something from a story?
Topic sentence at the end
Here’s part of a paragraph from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Notice the topic sentence at the end of the description: (more…)
by Sharon Watson | Jan 25, 2015 | High School Prompts, High School Tutorial, Sharon's Blog, tutorial, Writing Prompts
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS
In a story, clothing can be the author’s way of telling us what kind of character we’re reading about.
What are they wearing?
Judging real people by their clothing might not be too smart, but authors rely on readers to judge characters based on their characters’ clothing.
For instance, someone in a black leather jacket with a skull embroidered on the back and chains hanging from a pants pocket is going to be very different from someone in a light aqua-colored jacket carrying an umbrella with pink flowers on it. We make assumptions of people according to their appearance. (more…)
by Sharon Watson | Nov 30, 2014 | High School Prompts, High School Tutorial, Sharon's Blog, teaching aids, tutorial, Writing Prompts
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS
Although author Joseph Conrad was born in Poland as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he learned to speak and write in English in his twenties.
The fact that he learned how to write in the English language so late in life makes his command of the language, as seen in his stories, impressive.
Joseph Conrad is famous for his novella Heart of Darkness in which the narrator goes on a voyage to the jungles of Africa in the late 1800s in search of a man named Kurtz.
Below is the narrator’s description of a scene he comes upon. You can tell by the words and items he chooses in this description that what he finds next will not be nice: (more…)
by Sharon Watson | Nov 9, 2014 | High School Prompts, High School Tutorial, Literature, Sharon's Blog, tutorial, Writing Prompts
HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS
Robert Louis Stevenson is the author of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, the deliciously creepy The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and My. Hyde based on a real person, and much more. You can learn more about him here.
Pirate in disguise
In Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins is warned to be on the lookout for and avoid “the seafaring man with one leg.” Yet when he meets a sailor with one leg named Long John Silver, Hawkins is not troubled. Why?
First, he’s had a letter from his friend the squire claiming that Long John Silver is a war veteran who lost his leg “in his country’s service.” Next, when he meets Silver for himself, Silver seems “clean and pleasant-tempered.” Here is the paragraph where Jim Hawkins meets the truly nasty Long John Silver who, at the moment, doesn’t seem so nasty: (more…)
