Language Arts Stack //

[Lisa Westbrook]

Mark,

Thanks for sharing this.  With only a bit of trial and error, I  
figured out how to use it.  The bowling balls look cool too. Like  
Marielle's feedback on the % accurate, I wasn't sure how it was  
tabulated.  Personally, I'm an advocate of 'joy of learning' over  
grades anyway. But some people are highly affected by how many they  
get correct, teens may be especially sensitive, so the more clear it  
can be for them, the better.

I only have one idea you might like for future products.....I wonder  
if you could use sentences from classic texts, like that are  
available on gutenberg, or others that are now in the public domain,  
so the student could get a piece of history at the same time.  You  
could list the text it came from, when it was written, and the author  
in italics at the bottom. The students might appreciate getting to  
practice while learning a sentence from an author from history at the  
same time. (I'd be willing help you find sentences, as I am slightly  
addicted to hunting down old texts ;-) )......I realize this would be  
a lot harder to do.

I'll give you a similar example at the first grade level.  Several  
teachers I've talked to said they are tired of sentences like "Zippy  
the Zebra goes to the zoo" for first graders to practice writing.

So I got a program called Start Write that lets you make up your own  
sentences with the little dots for kids to go over.  So we've been  
making up sentences with the animal theme. The difference is the  
sentences are not whimsical animals like Zippy; rather they are real  
animals and the sentences say something about their habitat.  (I  
should tell you that doing I'm doing this with a nonprofit, as a  
volunteer [I do have a background in instructional design  
though)....and its just for fun, not money...)

Here's one example for conveying a little information about ants.

A is for Ant.

Ants like to work. They like to pitch in and they like to keep  
moving. You might even see them rebuilding shortly after a storm.

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If I was given the task to help design for higher grades, it might be  
fun to pull more advanced information (sentences, passages) for the  
kind of practice that you have in your program.....



To give you an idea of what I mean, I pulled four examples of varying  
complexity that I could get to easily from an old English text by  
Swinton.  See if you like any of them:

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"In 1717 my brother James returned from England with a press and  
letters, to set up his business in Boston."
from Franklin's autobiography in Studies in English Literature by  
William Swinton, published in1899.


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"He kept his  honesty and truth,
His independent tongue and pen,
And moved in manhood as in youth,
Pride of his fellow-men."
from Fitz-Greene Halleck's Tribute to Burns, Swinton (1899)

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"None of our great poets can be called popular in any exact sense of  
the word, for the highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions  
which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubtful limits of that  
shore between our abiding divine and our fluctuating human nature,  
rooted in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid bare and  
otherwise visible only at exceptional moments of entire calm and  
clearness."
from Lowell's Characterization of Wordsworth, Swinton (1899).

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"Everything that Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with  
the purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beautiful in human  
nature, with the most vehement scorn of cowardly compromise with  
things base; and yet, immitigable as his demand for the highest in us  
seems to be, there is always something reassuring in the humorous  
sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemnation and consoles  
for shortcoming."
from Lowell's Characterization of Carlyle, Swinton (1899)......

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Mark, the fact that you have gotten it to this level is impressive to  
me!  I hope you will be encouraged.


Lisa