Description:

In this class, I will bring students through the Writing with Ease Level 3. This curriculum is a complete language arts curriculum designed for third graders, yet it is easily scaled up or down.  

Writing with Ease beautifully presents small passages from classic stories and well-chosen non-fiction as models to read and study.  In class, we will engage in each passage, and the students will participate weekly in crafting a narration and/or a summary from the passage with me. A narration includes as much detail as one can remember from a short piece of text; a summary is a broad overview of a text with a few paragraphs. Both are important skills as a writer and a thinker. 

Each week in class, we will also study the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in a model sentence that is related to the given passage.

The tasks mentioned above cover most of the tasks in days one, two, and four of the given curriculum. Day three is optional and could be completed at home. The required homework for class will be for students to copy the narration or summary from that class that week into their notebooks and to study and/or copy the model sentence so that they are prepared to write it at the beginning of the next class period.

Students who are up for a challenge could do any of the following variations, each challenge flexing a skill in a different area: 1) Complete the task from day three, which is a new summary from a new passage, 2) Write the summary/narration from class while having someone dictate it to them instead of copying it from the work we did on the board that week, or 3) If in class we wrote both a summary and a narration, the student could choose to copy both instead of just one. 

Supplemental punctuation work may be used from Frode Jensen’s General Punctuation, and we will make time in class to have fun thinking about words and spelling with games and challenges.

Students will need the stamina to write three sentences in a row without taking long breaks. (Pencil grips are welcome.) Ideally, students will be able to participate in reading the passages aloud in class, but please let me know if this expectation is problematic because I can make exceptions.