
Digital PDF activity sheets with playable MP3 audio files. For use on all capable computers, whiteboards,
tablets and mobile devices.
Sharpen your students’
ability to write clear, concise, and technically accurate short stories using
music and special effects to enhance mental imagery. The self-directing,
self-correcting lessons offer numerous opportunities to recognize sentence
parts, punctuate accurately, and to correctly structure a paragraph. Skills
Covered: nouns and pronouns, verbs, understanding subject and predicate as
basic parts of a sentence, verb tenses, correct/verb agreement, use of the verb
"to be" verbs with helping words, phrases, dependent-independent
clauses, capitalization of proper nouns, abbreviations, quotations, and much
more. The approximate reading level is fourth grade and the program is excellent
for upper elementary level students and adults.
Lesson 1 Recognizing Parts of a Sentence
Lesson 2 Learning About Verbs
Lesson 3 Build Better Sentences with Phrases and Clauses
Lesson 4 Sentence Signposts: Capitalization
Lesson 5 Sentence Signposts: Punctuation
Lesson 6 Paragraphs that Make Sense
Sharpening Writing Skills is a multimedia series of six lessons designed to build technical and creative writing skills for students in grades 4 through 12.
Each lesson in the program
consists of audio media and student activity sheets. The audio combines expert
instruction in writing skills with themes that are relevant to the interests of
students. The program concentrates on parts of speech, punctuation, and correct
sentence and paragraph structure.
Every effort has been made to make all elements of the program enjoyable and meaningful. All lessons are self-directing and self-correcting. This allows students to work through the lessons at an independent rate and to evaluate their performances privately.
Click here to view the Teacher's Guide.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO AN MP3 AUDIO SAMPLE.
THE AUDIO
The lessons in Sharpening
Writing Skills employ a variety of motivational techniques designed to
capture and hold the interest of students. Each audio medium begins with music,
special audio effects, or a short vignette played out by characters. The
students are then carefully guided through the entire lesson by a professional
narrator who uses a friendly, positive approach to writing instruction.
Timed pauses are included to allow the students to complete brief responses on the activity sheets. However, when more than a few seconds are needed to complete a response or to read over specific material, an electronic tone signals the students to stop the player. Students should be reminded that they may stop the player whenever additional response time is needed, or to reverse the audio to replay any material they may wish to hear.
The use of headsets is recommended to avoid distracting other students in the classroom and to reinforce the interaction between student and narrator.
The running times of the audio media average approximately 15 minutes each. The average working time of each lesson is about 25 minutes. It should be remembered that this time is only an approximation. Since the student stops and starts the player several times during the course of each lesson to read material or to complete exercises, the actual time needed will depend on the student's working speed. Because of the nature of the content, lessons may differ in length.
THE ACTIVITY SHEETS
Three illustrated activity
sheets are used in each lesson of the program. Activities are completed as the
presentation progresses. The responses for these activities are checked and
corrected by the student through answers given by the narrator. The activity
sheets offer a variety of skill-building games and enjoy- able written
activities to increase the student's writing ability. All exercises are closely
correlated with the instructions.
This guide contains
individual summaries of the six lessons in the program. Each summary gives a
concise description of each written activity, and is presented with
reproductions of all student activities, with answers over- printed.
Included in the final pages is an extra creative writing activity for each lesson. These activities may be used with small groups of students to reinforce the skills taught in a lesson.
- Stock: In Stock
- Model: SWS