Language Arts Stack

[Mark Greenberg]

On Wednesday, July 27, 2005, at 10:00 AM, Lisa Westbrook wrote:

> 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.

Thanks, Lisa.

> Like
> Marielle's feedback on the % accurate, I wasn't sure how it was
> tabulated.

Backspaces / Characters

> 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 mix it.  For some of my assignments I allow the students to explore, 
and as long as they do, they receive high marks.  Some of my 
assignments are highly competitive (obviously).  Neither method reaches 
all my kids.  Some get bored and tune out when there is no objective 
measurement holding them to the task, while some freak out under the 
pressure of competition.
>
> 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.

Yes.  I agree.  My sentences sound contrived.  One of my beta testers 
actually thought I was making up special sentences that would work in 
the isolated environment of "grammar" (as if we don't usually use 
grammar to form sentences).

I have considered pulling sentences from literature.  Using RegEx, it 
would not be that difficult to find the sentences.  There are a couple 
of drawbacks, however.  Since the students are combining elemental 
sentences rather than dividing complex ones, I'd have to pull apart the 
sentences from literature for the kids.  Then the kids would be putting 
them back together in ways that may or may not make sense when compared 
to the original.  The other drawback that I see is that older English 
does not use the same vocab, patterns, and even grammatical rules that 
we use today.  Often sentences in literature are so styled and complex 
that it would be hard to distill them to elemental sentences.

One solution is to create sentences that deal with subjects that the 
students are studying in school: science, art, music, history, 
government, etc.  This is still pretty time consuming, but it is better 
than Zippy the Zebra  : )

Another possible source of sentences is the daily news.

>
> 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.

Please explain.  Is it the same StartWrite program that I found on the 
web that teaches penmanship?

> 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.

At the moment, doing something like that in Rev seems to be beyond my 
skill.  Years ago I tested a computer program that was supposed to 
teach students how to write well called the Alaska Writing Project.  It 
guided students to compose various genre of writing by asking them 
questions along the way.  It didn't do much more than a good writing 
teacher would do anyway, except that it was on the computer.  The 
teacher still had to read the student work and give individual 
feedback.  It may as well have been an essay or story with the guiding 
questions on a photocopy.  Writing language arts stacks that actually 
help the students is difficult, much more difficult than for math or 
science.  It boils down to the fact that in authentic writing, the 
writer is free to express herself in an infinite number of ways.  And 
there is no way to evaluate that on the computer.

Thanks for the feedback.

		Mark