Activities for English - pdf

Ideas That Really Work! Activities for Teaching English and Language Arts


Details

Author: Cheryl Miller Thurston
Product Code: 6029
ISBN: 978-1-877673-84-9
Pages: 204


Description

Have you ever wondered if the author of some of your textbooks ever actually met a real boy or girl? If so, you will enjoy Ideas That Really Work! Written by a former junior high English teacher, this book is easy to use, easy to understand, often humorous, and always practical. The ideas are classroom tested and really do work.
The book is a potpourri of materials that will make your life easier and it covers a wide range of topics. Just a few of them:
writing introductions;
understanding plagiarism;
using quotation marks correctly;
using commercials to teach critical thinking;
looking at slang;
planning a schoolwide English trivia bowl; and
grammar ideas for teachers who hate teaching grammar.

The book is very adaptable and is targeted for grades 7–9, although much of the book can be used with older students as well.


About the Author

Cheryl Miller Thurston is a former teacher, a playwright, and author of many books for teachers, including Attitude!, Capitalization, and The Extra Book. She is a winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference Play Award. She lives in Loveland, Colorado.


Customer Reviews

No matter the age (we are a high school), students like to be silly and some of the plans in this book will allow the students to be learning while having fun...

When the well runs dry, IDEAS THAT WORK can really help teachers find interesting ways to teach English and the language arts. This book is guaranteed to stimulate many positive classroom activities.

WOW! You have got to get this book! I have been teaching ELA for 18 years and have read a plethora of books on teaching writing. What I like most about Ideas That Work is that it contains solid, interesting, practical lessons about teaching writing. It provides blackline masters of lesson components. Some of the most useful lessons is a structured approach to teaching the five-paragraph essay. The book breaks the concepts down into the basic structure in sections, such as writing the introduction and conclusion, organizing the body paragraphs into topic sentences, examples, and details, word choice, grammar and punctuation, and other writing elements. I've been using a scaffolding approach teaching writing. These lessons provide the support I need to accomplish my goals. The midel writings are excellent. The models contain sentence variety, varieties of openers for introductions, and are examples of solid writing skills.

This book is by no means limited to what I have been describing. There are good lessons on a variety of topics including, but not limited to: grading student writing (use the "Look Inside This Book" feature in the book listing here on Amazon), encouraging creativity by using methods such as cartooning, grammar and punctuation, ELA games, speech skills, activities for the different seasons of the year, and following directions.

In short, Ideas That Work is a great book for providing mini-lessons, writing instruction introductions, and the teaching of writing skills. I suggest you get this book!

There are many "grab and go" resources for any Secondary English/Language Arts teacher. The activities are engaging and written in a way that is appealing to students. I have been more than pleased with this purchase, and I would highly recommend it to any English/Language Arts teacher.