Welcome to HIT—How I Teach…. Each week in this innovative audiocast/videocast, I bring you tips, tricks, and techniques for teaching writing, language arts, grammar, and more (to grades two through twelve) drawing upon my 100+ curriculum books totaling over 50,000 pages.
But wait…there’s more! Not only do I teach parents, teachers, and homeschoolers the hundreds of teaching tools I have developed over the past twenty years, listeners/viewers also get a weekly downloadable booklet, Teacher’s Notebook (TN), that has actual lesson sheets that you can print off and use with your students to teach the very topics that I just taught you!
This week’s episode is chock full of helps in how to teach beginning research writing to students in fourth through eighth grades! And…is uses animals of the jungle (based on the book/movie, The Jungle Book). Here is what you will learn:
1. Why kids need ideas for their topic—but need to have the freedom to narrow it down to their specific choice
2. The importance of giving students expectations for each writing project ahead of time
3. The pre-writing skills that are needed in order for a student to research and write from a source
4. How to teach paragraph division painlessly through the Topic of Paragraph Line for outlines
5. How to use questions on outlining cards to help students narrow their research focus
6. How to introduce quotation inclusion gently with one quote per paper and student’s choice of where to include that quote
7. How to use a sample outline and sample research report to effectively guide students in these skills
8. How to use my signature Color-Coded Research method to make researching pain-free and visual
9. And more!
In the first episode of HIT, I focused on writing an essay about three “favorites” (tweaked for older and younger students). This week I build on that by continuing with the one-topic-per-paragraph idea but finding the information for each paragraph in sources as opposed to “getting it from your brain.”
Giving students the tools they need to succeed is one of the most important things that I do as a teacher! I have included some helpful tools for you to print off and use also! 😉
Note: This lesson came from Write On, Mowgli, Level II, a month-long downloadable book!
Find everything you need here!
Weekly broadcast episodes with Teacher’s Notebook downloads (and links to listen or watch!) at the Language Arts Lady blog
Master (continually updated) Teacher’s Notebook downloadable booklet
Free writing books and videos of me teaching your students for you for a couple of weeks!
All of my digital books!
How I Teach YouTube Channel
How I Teach Podcast