HAPPPPPPYYYY NEEEWWWWW YEEEAAARRRR!!!!!!!!!! January

Am I late???? Things have just crept up on us!!! I can't believe we just got back from vacation and it's already the end of the month! Where has the time gone????  We are buckling down for FCAT Writing that will be in February...I think we have some amazing writers in our class!!! All they need is a little tweaking and we will ROCK that FCAT!  Here are a few things you can do at home to help your child prepare for the writing test.  Continue to keep the lines of communication opened with your child.  Give them a topic and ask them to make up a story for it.  For example,  Tell me about a day you had an amazing surprise.  Make sure the story is full of details and little mini stories and experiences.  Here are a few ideas that I pulled from the internet:

• Give your fourth-grader a narrative topic through prompts such as "A Day We Went to the Zoo" or "An Unforgettable Day in My Life." For expository topics, choose examples such as "Eating Healthy Food" or "Importance of Reading." With a 10th-grader, provide writing prompts for persuasive essays such as "Convince a Friend to Continue Schooling" or "Persuade Your School Principal to Abolish the School Uniform."   

     

• Sit with your child and assess the essay he wrote for spelling and grammar. Mark out misspelled words and have him check them up in a dictionary. Look at punctuation and grammar, and using other examples, help your child understand the mistakes in his essay.

          

• Mark words that you consider ambiguous or weak. Ask your child to explain the exact point she wants to convey, and encourage your child to browse a dictionary of synonyms to find the most appropriate word. Show your child how to test a variety of words by saying them aloud in the sentence to discover which sounds best.

• Prepare an essay that is full of content arranged in a haphazard manner. Give it to your child and ask him to organize the content into introductory, body and concluding paragraphs. Explain how this improves the flow of the topic

• Set a schedule for your child to read newspapers, magazines and Internet articles. Ask her to note down observations regarding sentence structure, ways of describing and the use of idioms and phrases. Encourage her to use a few of these while preparing her essay.

• Give your child prompts on different relevant topics and ask him to come up with an outline of at least five ideas on which he will focus for each. For expository and persuasive essays, get him to think of quotes by famous personalities that connect to the topic and show how he can incorporate these in the introduction or the conclusion.

Hope this helps!! Thank you for helping me!


PS Yipee!!! Congrats to my Students of the Month I am so proud of you!!!!
September: Priscilla
October:  Kaithlyn
November: Jasmine R.