1. Welcome to Open House!

2. Philosophy Students learn best when they are repeatedly presented with and actively involved with the most important concepts. The most important concepts in Language Arts are the five components of good writing, focus, content, organization, style and conventions.

3. Five Components Students will attack their writing with the focus, content, organization, style, and conventions in mind. They will be given strategies and tips for improving each in their writing.

4. Style vs. Conventions Until this point, students’ definition of good writing has probably been good writers capitalize all the right words, spell all the words correctly, and punctuate in the correct place. While we are striving for this standard, there is more to writing than just using the correct conventions.

5. Style vs. Conventions (continued) An emphasis will be placed on creativity or style. Students will use techniques such as dependent clauses, gerunds, participles, appositives, compound sentences, adjectives, prepositional phrases etc. Anything that complicates sentence structure improves the creativity or style of writing.

6. Addressing Conventions We use the textbook on a VERY limited basis. In fact, students will not receive a textbook. We will address conventions (spelling, punctuation, capitalization) through weekly correction quizzes.

7. Addressing Conventions (Correction Quizzes) Students will receive two sentence on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. These sentences will be written incorrectly. After writing the sentences in their notebooks, students will review the mistakes each day. In addition, students will be given a study guide with the all the sentences and the correct way to write them. You can always look on the wikii page to access these study guides each week.

8. Papers The emphasis will be placed on writing. This class really is a composition class. We will write to narrate, inform, and persuade. Most of this writing will take place in class. We will examine and dissect many example papers. In addition, by using the smartboard and digital presenter, we will develop our writing together as an entire class. I will conference with each student individually about their writing prior to them turning it in to be graded.

9. Spelling Students have received a packet complete with every spelling list for the entire year. Students will also receive a spelling list for each week on Mondays. These weekly lists will be placed on the wikii page for you to access from home. Each Monday, students will write their words three times each for a homework assignment.