English 300-1 Mini Lesson: Clauses and Phrases

Audience= 8th grade students

1) Engage: I will engage the students' attention by wearing a Santa hat and giving out candy to those brave enough to participate and answer quesitons correctly

2) Explore: I will give examples of different clauses and phrases, and they will distinguish and analyze them. There will also be a hidden question on one of the power point slides.

3) Explain: I will explain the rules and differences between the types of clauses and phrases and how to distinguish between them.

4) Expand: I will ask the students to write for me an example of both an independent and dependent clause, noting the differences between the two and any conjective adverbs, dependent words, etc.

5) Evaluate: Students will take a quiz on clauses. http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/quizzes/indep_clause_quiz.htm


6) E-Search: I will be giving my lesson via PowerPoint as well as giving an online assessment.


Homework will be taking this online assessment and sending me their scores via email at nathan.maul@grammar300.com

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/quizzes/phrase_quiz.htm

Model of Mini Lesson and LC

Model for Mini Lesson:

The day before you hold your mini lesson, make sure you publish a SHORT OVERVIEW as a “new post” on this blog, indicating what you are going to do for the 6 E’s. This will help students who have missed the class to keep up to date with what we’ve been doing, and everybody to learn for the grammar parts of the midterm/final exams. Also, put the URL’s you will use for the 6^th E (e-search) on this blog, so people can practice your grammar topic.

If your overview is missing, 30 points will be deducted from your mini lesson overall points (200). If for any reason you experience blogging issues, you must email your outline with the URL’s to all peers before your presentation starts; in this case, you can paste your overview onto the blog later when you’ve solved your issue. A non-posted or non-emailed overview before the start of the presentation cannot be made up.

First of all, choose an appropriate heading for your blog post about your mini lesson in the subject line, and also label it accordingly (there is a field at the lower right hand corner for “label”). The label enables your peers to use the search function and find your topic.

Then, define your self-selected age group of your audience. Your age-appropriate teaching style will be graded accordingly. That means, for younger grades you would have to choose more colors, a more child-friendly style, more break-ups, images, easier language, etc....

Your 6 E’s should generally be in chronological order, but if it fits you can combine two E’s (such as “explore” and “e-search,” if both actions take place in one step). Your “engage” is your attention-catcher, something to keep your students' motivation up; it can be a picture, a sound file, hands-on material, a joke/anecdote, a game, a wrong sentence where students have to find the mistake, etc…. be creative!

Your “visuals” can be writing on the board, handouts, graphic organizers, manipulatives (= hands-on material), etc.

Note that if you assign homework, your peers are not actually going to do it; but it will be graded as a good component (e.g., as “evaluate”). Just tell your peers what you “would” assign.

This is an example for an overview of my

Mini Lesson: WHO or WHOM???

Audience = 9th grade students

1. E (engage): The attention-catcher is a picture (comic). Can be integrated in a ppt presentation.

2. E (explore): The students will get a few sentences where “who”/”whom” is either wrong or right, and they’ll have to state without knowing the rules yet what they “feel” is the right form.

3. E (explain): The teacher will explain the simple rules of how to distinguish the cases of subject and object, to find out whether the use of “who” or “whom” is appropriate. (Indicate the sources where you got your information from. Those can be grammar books, websites, etc.)

4. E (expand): The students will make up an analoguous list of sample sentences to find out rules why “whoever” or “whomever” is correct, making inferences from what they’ve learned before when dealing with “who” and “whom.”

5. E (evaluate): For assessment, the students will take a short online grammar quiz about the difference between WHO and WHOM, and one more difficult quiz where they have to choose between multiple pronouns, such as WHO, WHOM, WHOEVER, WHOMEVER, WHO’S, WHOSE.

6. E (e-search): (this is a student-centered research activity)

For homework, the students will

1) go to the Grammar Girl’s site (text file, audio file) and read / listen to an example of how she explains the difference between “who” and “whom” to a listener of her radio show.

2) After that, the students will pretend to be Grammar Girl, and answer a self-selected grammar question about “who,” “whom,” “whoever,” “whomever,” etc. in the same style as she did – funny, but informative. They will google the topic to find questions and answers (research part).

3) The 9th grade students will record their "radio show" on tape and bring it to class to be played for a class of 6th graders whom they are supposed to teach about this topic.

Learning Cycle - Homework for Jan. 16th

Homework for Friday, January 16th:

First task: We are going to learn about the basics for our mini lessons which will be held according to the Learning Cycle (LC) model. Read the following explanation of the Learning Cycle: LC


According to this model, a Learning Cycle consists of 5 E's:
Engage (you catch your students' attention to the topic)
Explore (the kids find things out by themselves)
Explain (students try to analyze the problem; you explain the rules to them)
Expand (kids get a different task to apply what they've found out)
Evaluate (you assess their comprehension)

HOWEVER, some people even suggest that a LC does not only have 5 E's, but 6! The mysterious number six is "E-search." Read the following article: http://science.nsta.org/enewsletter/2005-05/sc0411_47.pdf

When you're done with this, here's your second task:

Post a short comment of ~ 100-200 words on this blog what you think about the Learning Cycle model. Suggestions for answers: Originally, it was conceived for math or science classes. Do you think it is useful for English (or any language, or ESL) classes? Would you use it? Were you taught this way? What about the 6th E? Do you think it is a good idea, or is it unnecessary (especially when teaching English and/or grammar)??? Your personal opinion...

ENGFISH - homework for Wed., Jan. 14

Let's jump in at the deep end right away: here's your first prompt, which will be homework for Wednesday, January 14th: go to the following link

http://www.kristisiegel.com/engfish2.htm

Read the excerpt "The Poison Fish" from Ken Marcrorie's book Telling Writing.
It talks about ENGFISH, a common form of student writings (AND textbook writings!!) that you will encounter during your future career as teachers.

Your task: write a short blog comment about your personal experience with ENGFISH - are you maybe student teaching already, and have seen it in your kids' writing? Did they serve you ENGFISH in their final exams when they wrote: "When I came into this class I knew nothing, but this semester I've learned so much; I owe it all to you, and you are a great teacher"?! Or did you produce ENGFISH texts yourself in certain situations? What do you think about the term? Does it work for you, or do you think it is inadequate? Better suggestions? Or do you perhaps have a funny example of ENGFISH you want to share? How can its use be avoided?

Welcome!!!

Welcome to Dr. V's grammar course 300-1 for education majors!

This is going to be a fun course.


As prerequisites, you need three things:

1) your new email address, which is firstname.lastname@grammar300.com, and which you will receive on the first day of class if you were enrolled in this course. Example: mike.fisher@grammar300.com

Your password for the log-in is firstnamelastname. Example: mikefisher

You can change your passwords, if you like. Note that if you don't, your peers and teacher will be able to read your emails -- but, who would...

If you join this course AFTER the first day of class, and were not on the class list before, talk to me in order to receive your email address!!!

This is the ONLY email address with which we will correspond. I have a corresponding email address with my name, Christina Voss. This system will facilitate the correspondence among peers, because if you have a name list, you will be able to email anybody from our class, which is important for our peer-editing session and other exchanges. It also enables me to send out mass emails to all of you, such as your exams or homework. It further saves me the trouble of finding out who is behind dancingqueen@aol.com ;-)


2) an invitation to join this blog. It should be in your grammar300.com email inbox. If it is not there for some reason, talk to me!!! If you got it, click on it to accept it. Your homework for coming Wednesday, January 14th, will be a first blog post, so you all need to be signed up.


3) access to the livetext account I set up for this course. There, you will see our syllabus and schedule. Also, the pdf files of our course readings are attached to the separate classes. Here, you can see what we are going to do each day. I will also post your due dates for presentations there, for example for the mini lessons each of you is going to hold.

You do NOT need to have a livetext account on your own to join our profile (it costs about $90). You simply log into mine with the password I give you on the first day of class. You do NOT need to type anything into livetext; it is for reading purpose only.