This course is comprised of weeks 9-12 of a one-semester (16-week) writing course appropriate for ages 8-13. 

Students can expect to have fun while learning how to elevate their writing style through grammatical and stylistic devices. Each individual class will focus on a specific aspect of writing. Each assignment will include a checklist that builds over time, and all submitted assignments receive an evaluation with detailed feedback. The assignments also include additional activities such as vocabulary words and sentence rewrites. 

In Lesson 9, we continue our examination of parts of speech and add in the correct usage of dialogue, which often has tricky punctuation! Students should have mastered the ideas of dependent and independent clauses, as well as the use of subordinate conjunctions and the use of prepositional phrases and adverbs as sentence openers. The assignment this week is a narrative that begins with “I almost made that jump!” Students must demonstrate active verbs and all other requirements in the checklist. 

In Lesson 10, students will begin to add “dress up” devices to their work. The first such device is alliteration, and students will examine Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” for its masterful use of alliteration. A secondary discussion is about diction, which is how something is said. Students will practice using formal and informal diction and must demonstrate this in their assignment. 

In Lesson 11, students circle back to the concept of adverbs and examine adverbs that don’t end in -ly. These are adverbs that show how, when, where, how often, and to what extent. We will also continue perfecting dialogue and its punctuation. 

Lesson 12 brings in another form of sentence openers: participial openers. Students will also review prepositions, dialogue, and description. This week is notable for the fact that students now have TEN items in their checklist that they must display in their assignment! They must also avoid these words: all to be verbs, go/goes/come/came/went. For the assignment, they must retell a fairytale from another character’s point-of-view.