Topic: Revising, Introductions, and Conclusions; Review of bibliographies
Materials needed: a variety of non-fiction books and magazines, Student Resource Notebook (SRN)
Because I’ve seen the results, but often forget, I am trying to include more modeling and group practice in my classes, rather than just lecture. With this class, it is essential to give them hands-on experience and lots of review since we only have ten weeks. Times of review and practice also allow me time to read over their assignments at the beginning of class and then discuss what they wrote and any weak areas I found.
Review and practice: Bibliographic citation and format
In the first week, I introduced them to bibliographic citation and required them to include it on all their assignments. For this exercise, I brought issues of Cobblestone, Faces, Calliope, and Christian History. Along with the magazines, I chose six elementary level non-fiction books, primarily because they are lighter to carry! Each student had to choose two books and two articles, locate and note all bibliographic information, and list them in proper bibliographic format.I didn’t do enough modeling or instruction. Thankfully they had the pages from the SRN that covers bibliographies, so they were able to reference those. I overheard them correcting each other and helping locate information.
While they did this, I was reading paragraphs from the previous week and keeping an ear open for questions. Questions came:
- What if there are multiple locations listed? (use the one closest geographically)
- What location do I use for the magazines? (you don’t need one)
- What about initials and middle names in authors?
I love when these exercises bring forth questions—it shows they are thinking about the task--even when these questions were answered in the introduction to the material. Sometimes they ask something that I’ve forgotten to cover.
As I read the paragraphs, I noted common weaknesses I was seeing. It doesn’t change from class to class. The errors I noticed were:
- Incorrect use of commas with compound subjects or verbs vs. main clause/coordinating conjunction/main clause.
- Apostrophe errors—it’s/its especially
- Commas and periods vs. closing quotation marks
- Misplaced modifiers
I returned their papers and then reviewed these errors using my own sentences (I really don’t do well composing on the fly) on the board.
Finally, we discussed introductions and conclusions. Their assignment for the week is to write an introduction and conclusion to the paragraphs they wrote last week. We used my favorite example of a hamburger with a top and bottom bun being the introduction and conclusion. Because some of them had a speech class last semester, they knew that an introduction had to grab the attention and the conclusion had to restate the themes. I did give my big rule of introductions: Don’t say, “In this paper, I’m going to tell you ----, ----, and ----.” I ran out of time to do some modeling, so we’ll probably revisit introductions and conclusions next week.
Homework: Write introduction and conclusion paragraphs for your report on how robots work.
