Based here in Oklahoma,
The Institute for Excellence in Writing is
the company to look toward for your composition needs! We recently
discovered a few more of their resources, however, including the Teaching with Games Set, Timeline
of Classics and A Word Write Now. While the last
one is specifically for writing, the other two have been fantastic
surprises to add to our everyday classroom. Let's order them by our family's favorites...
Teaching with Games
makes it simple to use games to teach and review concepts in any subject
area. This book includes many original games, and the DVD workshop
demonstrates how to quickly and easily adapt the games to any subject, grade
level, and number of players. Add some fun to your curriculum and watch
your kids love learning!
This was hands-down our
favorite new resource! We printed out several of the games, and the
youngest helped to cut and laminate them. If you don't already have a
laminator, you'll want to pick one up to use with these games, because your
family will want to play them repeatedly!
We spent our Fun Fridays
playing games to reinforce concepts learned during the week. We had been
learning about the Revolutionary War, so we used Revolutionary War Jeopardy. I varied the point
system based on age, and they got to keep the cards they won. At the end,
we had a couple of cards that no one was able to answer, and so I know what we
need to work a bit more on. This game is great because you can re-create
it for any subject...and the competition really gets their brains going!
Two of their favorite
subjects from last year were rocks & minerals and Ancient Egypt, so we decided to try out some games to
review those topics as well. For Ancient Egypt, we played a matching memory game, where they had to find the
description and the object it described from a pile of face-down cards.
For rocks & minerals, I read a description aloud and the first to
name it's mineral won the card. Of those two, matching memory was the
decided favorite.
We also reviewed world
geography with the continents game. The youngest sat on the floor to
match which geographical locations went with the continent, while I challenged
the oldest to do it without looking at the cards (which I had color-coded, and
he had figured that out). For North America, they had to put the feature
in it's correct location on the continent.
Overall, these games
were a hit! They reinforced information (I'm not sure I'd use them to
introduce material) and we got to play for Fun Friday! If you'd like to
pick them up, the two DVDs & one CD-ROM run for a total of 130 minutes and
contain many of the sample games for your use. The spiral-bound book has
the games and directions for each.
The Timeline of
Classics is broken down into four parts: The Ancients, The Middle
Ages, The Renaissance and Reformation, and The Modern World. These line
up perfectly with curricula such as Story of the World and Biblioplan (among
others). Each section has charts that are presented in four columns, each
listing "description or time period," title, author, and level.
Levels are represented by E (elementary), M (middle school), and H (high
school). Descriptions are brief, and note key ideas, era, and location.
This resource saved me a
lot of time, since I didn’t have to research what books would make good
supplements for the unit we are studying. It also indicates videos and
audio books that fit each era. They are in chronological order within the
era, making it easy to know exactly which book to check out next. We
started putting stars next to the ones we have read, and will probably continue
to do this as we moved through the different eras. For now, most of our
stars are next to (E) books, but the kids love reading, and I look forward to
the day when everything is starred! *Note – we may switch from
stars to dates, to use this as a school record.*
In spite of blending perfect with the classical style,
Timeline of Classics can be used with any curriculum or teaching style.
It is very flexible, and if you start recording things as you read them, you’ll
have a ‘transcript’ of sorts to document your studies.
This resource can be
purchased in PDF version or as a physical, spiral-bound book. Since the
copyright allows for duplicating the pages for personal use, all you have to do
is highlight the books to be read, and your student has his/her reading list for
the year!
You can see samples of the Timeline of Classics here.
This book contains
fascinating words to spice up any writing - your children's or your own!
IEW has compiled a thesaurus that is appropriate for even the youngest of
children to use in their writing, but still quite helpful for older students
and adults. The back of the book also includes a glossary of literary
terms and devices, which is helpful in teaching.
This is a fantastic
resource! We are just now beginning to work on writing (better late than
never!) and my children continually use the same words over and over
again. Therefore, we focused mainly on the descriptive words – these are
words that Andrew Pudewa refers to as “Dress Ups” – in our daily
writings. These “Dress Ups” are used to make writing more interesting, to
attract readers, and to pull readers into the story.
Essentially, this is a
thesaurus, but it’s arranged thematically, making it much easier for younger
children to use. Children will also appreciate the vivid colors and
easy-to-turn-spiral-bound pages.
The book includes these
three themes, each broken down into several pages of sub-themes
- Character Traits (what a person is like, or how they feel)
- Describing Words (colors, quantity, quality, etc)
- Movement & the Senses (descriptive tastes, sounds, etc)
You can see samples of A Word Write Now here.
TWSS
The Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) has revised one of their best-selling courses, and it's
better than ever!! Teaching Writing, Structure, and
Style (TWSS) is a
comprehensive course that helps teachers help their students to overcome issues
such as: not knowing what to write, where to begin, or how to break the process
down into manageable steps. The focus is on basic structures of
writing, with less emphasis on creative and expository writing. The
structure helps to provide a solid foundation for expanding to other areas of
writing.
The Curriculum
The main course is a
twelve-hour teaching seminar, with an accompanying workbook, for the TEACHER
(who is the student in this instance). The seminar workbook provides
notes from the seminar, as well as lots of samples and examples. Also
included is a set of four student demonstrations – an introduction writing
workshop for each of four grade groupings (1st – 2nd,
3rd – 5th, 6th – 8th, and
9th – 12th). The course focuses on the
following topics : note-taking, writing from notes, retelling stories,
summarizing, writing from pictures, creative writing, essay writing,
critiquing, and writing about literature.
When you purchase the
newest edition of the complete course,
you also receive free access to a number of extra resources.
The Blackline Masters e-book has 240 reproducible pages,
primarily to be used by students. Here is where you will find stories and
pictures to be used as writing source material, as well as checklists, outline
forms, and other resources that you need to teach the course. You are
given permission to reproduce these for your family or classroom.
The course also includes
a premium subscription, which gives you one year access to the complete series
of video lessons streamed to your computer or tablet, plus downloadable audio
talks, access to monthly webinar training, a recommended reading list,
mini-posters, mini-books, and pictures. I recommend that you purchase the course
with DVDs since I expect that many parents are likely to want to revisit the
video lessons and the student demonstrations beyond the first year.
Theoretically, once you have watched all of the videos, the manual should be
sufficient to help you teach the lessons, but you may want to revisit the DVDs.
The writing instruction
methods in this course can be used to teach students from first grade on up to
high school, and over a succession of years. The units stay the same, but
you expect continued improvement from the student as you gradually expand the
skills. The program also addresses common problems among writing
teachers, including: overcorrecting, not giving enough help, unclear
assignments, and over-expectation.
One of the
reason that these videos are so long is because the lessons move along slowly
enough for you to think and work through the process. This means that you
are more likely to end up with a solid grasp of the course content, especially
if you complete the writing assignments as you watch the seminar lessons.
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