Lanham Method

I use writing as a way to escape life. Whether this is a good or bad thing, you can decide. It works for me. Moving from one time period to another is something I love to experience. Reading is an important aspect of my life. Both professionally and personally, reading inspires me with new and creative ideas.

I don't remember reading for the first time, but I do remember laying my bed reading with my Mom. We read books like The Fourteen Bears in Summer and Winter by Evelyn Scott and James in the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl. Seeing my mom read constantly caused me to bring a book with me everywhere I go.

My reading really took off in high school. In AP English class, I read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Exposing myself to that kind of reading level is a growing experience. I found that plot and characters is not all there is to a story. All of a sudden I saw deeper meanings and themes.

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In class I have already expressed my woes of semicolons so that is one punctuation mark I would like to be able to use without being scared I am making a fool of myself. Well I will probably make a fool of myself more than once in class but I hope it won’t be grammatical. The example from the worksheet, First Day Activities, “Mottsburgh is a busy industrial city, thousands of cars and trucks move through it every day,” is one that I could see needed a semicolon. In my own writing however I second guess myself on whether to use one or not. That is just one of the punctuation marks that I need to work on this semester.

Nervousness and anxiety ridden, I try to write without making a fool of myself (absolute). In class I have already expressed my woes of semicolons, so that is one punctuation mark I would like to use without making a fool of myself. Making a fool of myself is nothing out of the ordinary for me, but I will try to make it a rare occurrence (participle). The Semicolon, an evil and confusing punctuation mark, keeps me second guessing myself and my grammar (appositive). Working on semicolons this semester, the Grammar Hammer will master them (participle).

FANBOYS and AAAWWUBIS

On Monday, we focused on FANBOYS and how to tell the difference between simple sentences, compound sentences, and complex sentences. I’m not sure that I can still tell the difference between all of them, but I am sure that with practice I will be an expert at it. We also got to listen to a country song and make her simple sentences into compound and complex sentences. It was nice to get to practice with something that wasn’t some hypothetical situation or worksheet. AAAWWUBIS was another thing we went over in class on Monday.

A-Although

A-As

W-When

W-While

U-Until

B-Because

I-If

S-Since

Now, I know that I am supposed to put a comma after these words when they are connecting two sentences together. Barbara went over this with us on the computer with our own sentences; this was so helpful, seeing sentences we created being used to show something we are learning is so great.

Wednesday was another helpful day we had a mini-lesson on commas after introductory elements, and also worked on scrapbook examples. I am so thankful that we have these mini-lessons. It is so great to be able to have short lessons that focus on one aspect of grammar and answer any questions about that specific rule. Stephanie and Shannon really seemed to know what they were talking about and I am happy they did. Scrapbooks seem to be really hard for people to get done in time for the deadline. Barbara noticed this and helped us by giving us almost half the period to find examples for our scrapbooks. It was wonderful to be able to ask her if what I found in the newspapers was actually an error, and to also have her explain what I need to say in my scrapbook to explain the error.

I am still kind of nervous about my grammar, I am never exactly sure when I should put commas and when to leave them out. Some of the time I do it right and some of the time I don’t, I am hoping that practice will help this. Of course I only have a semester to have Barbara pointing out my grammar mistakes, so I had better start learning soon. I have faith in Barbara and faith in myself to learn this stuff, I am trying really hard to not get discouraged about grammar.

Question of the Week:

So, Barbara said that it was optional to put a comma after an AAAWWUBIS, what is the reason for that?

How do we know when to punctuate?

Grammar this week focused on FANBOYS and also on how some teachers explain punctuation to their students FANBOYS was a mini lesson taught by Barbara to help explain how to combine two sentences that relate to one another this was a very good mini lesson that was given to us by starting with the FANBOYS and then when went straight to our own writing to try to find places that we were not using commas and FANBOYS where we needed to in Socratic Seminar we discussed the opinions of an article this article discussed how punctuation is taught in school the wrong way and the correct way the article seemed to feel that punctuation needed to be practiced through a child’s writing instead of doing grammatical drills for punctuation statistics even showed that children who practiced punctuation through writing understood punctuation better than students who worked solely with punctuation drills the author of the text even said that students who hand wrote their piece with no punctuation and then later added punctuation when typing it better understood punctuation and why it show go in certain places I am not sure if I agree or disagree with this statement it seems like students may still have a hard time punctuating correctly when typing their piece out if they do not understand punctuation we also talked about our own personal stories with grammar drills and how they seemed like busy work because they weren’t genuine sentences they look more like computerized sentences using genuine examples from our own actual writing was more helpful because it was authentic and applied to our own outcome of our own paper

Holy Cow! That was so hard! I could not, for the life of me, stop putting punctuation marks into the above block of writing. I kept subconsciously putting at least periods and indentations when my thoughts were changing from one subject to the next. My internal dialogue kept screaming, PUT THE PERIOD! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? I had to delete periods that I just automatically put. I feel like putting punctuation in my writing has been so ingrained into my mind that I can’t help but put punctuation. It’s interesting to see how I think about punctuation. I wonder if students feel this way about punctuation. I know that elementary school children do not understand, but what about middle school or even high school students? Do they understand where punctuation goes at least to a point where they have periods where thoughts change or end? How do we get these inner rules that scream at us to PUNCTUATE! I just don’t know. Did anyone else find it ridiculously hard to point out or realize what he or she was thinking while punctuating? Or did it seem like second nature?

Question of the week: Is this a comma splice-

“The more things you have, the more weight to carry, the more gear to worry about.”

Why or why not?

GRAMMAR GRAMMAR GRAMMAR

Another week of Grammar has gone by. I am so glad that we changed the way Socratic Seminar works in our class. Instead of having two separate circles there was only one. Having one circle helped with everyone participating when they wanted to; I also felt like the entire class was actively listening to the discussion even if they had nothing to say. I hope that having one group continues to help whole class participation.

On Monday we got to do more verb types. I was so glad that we got to work more on them. I was not sure how to find transitive verbs, linking verbs, or intransitive verbs. Barbara helped go through some with me so that I could see steps to finding them. I was really happy that Barbara would cross out the prepositional phrases of the titles in the newspaper so then there was nothing else but the type of verb and its subject or direct object. It seems like in Grammar we are going to have to build on our knowledge of word classes so knowing all of them is important. I really appreciate that Barbara had another day to work on it with us.

Barbara has said that in class we are going to be looking at our blog entries and that we are going to be upset when she tells us our mistakes. I don’t think I will get mad though. I am hoping that her telling me what I’m doing wrong will help me to improve my writing. It might surprise me the kinds of mistakes I am making but nonetheless it will help me.

I am also getting nervous about our Grammar Scrapbooks. I don’t want all of my examples to be from one newspaper or magazine. I want to have a variety of mistakes from different sources. I just hope that I have enough knowledge of grammar to find the mistakes. Although I am nervous about the actual examples I love doing the scrapbooking part. I love putting all of the paper together and making it coordinates with the rest of the book.

Where Oh Where Does The Verb Go?????

I would like to clarify that in my previous blog I was not using Chris for the apostrophe example because that is the only one I know of, but because it was the one that came to mind first. I just wanted to make that clear so that everyone knows I understand the new and old ways of using the apostrophe apply not just with this particular name. I am however, not trying to be a perfectionist or anything but Barbara showed concern about this so I thought I should address it. Now that that is taken care of I will discuss what went on during this week of class.

This week was different than previous weeks. I feel that the students were more involved in the learning this week. Both Monday and Wednesday were days where the students got to do a lot more talking and were more involved.

On Monday we did Socratic seminar. This is something that I have not done in previous classes. The process is very interesting to me. There are two groups that take turns discussing a passage (in this particular case) or idea while the other group watches. The passage that our class looked at described a class that needed more use of verbs and adjectives in their writing. At first the students were told specifically use verbs and adjectives in their writing. Then the students were given examples and got to feel and smell things then write. The students writing from one piece of writing to the next were drastically different. In the passage, it argued that giving children specific instructions limited and intimidated them while giving them actual pieces to inspire them helped their writing come alive. As we discussed this in our Socratic seminar everyone had something to say. Some agreed with the passage while others thought it didn’t teach any specific lesson. It was fun to hear everyone’s opinion and to also contribute to the discussion.

On Tuesday the class was supposed to have read in our Course Packet about the different categories different verbs fit into. We learned in class, three subcategories of main verbs and sentence patterns. The three verb categories are intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and linking verbs. Intransitive verbs are those verbs that can be by themselves meaning they don’t have to have modifiers. For example: My love grew does not need any other word. Grew is an intransitive verb because it does not need something to follow it. Transitive verbs are verbs that do need something to follow it or modify it. For example: My Dad sold cars, sold needs to have something following it to make it a complete sentence. Linking verbs are the third category that we learned on Wednesday. The linking verb is a link between the subject and the description of the subject. For example: You seem very tired, seem is linking the subject (you) to the description of the subject (tired). I knew that some verbs needed something added to complete a sentence and some verbs different things to the subject but I didn’t know what they were specifically called. In addition to learning the names of the verb categories we had to actually apply our knowledge by coming up with examples for each category.

Monday and Wednesday of this week were about the verb. During Socratic seminar we discussed how one teach used verb lessons in a classroom and on Wednesday we learned about the categories verbs can be in. It was nice to do something I have never done before with a discussion (Socratic seminar) because it helps me think about some things I could use in my own classroom in the future.

Question of the Week:
How can you tell what category a verb fits into? I know that if you put a verb into a sentence it is easier to figure out where the verb fits but is it always that easy?

P.S. I hope that this color is easier to read ;)

Chris, Chris', Chris's

Well, I lied, I said that I was going to write back in a week but it has been two. Don’t be mad, the lack of blogging was due to the lack of no assignment. Reading over my blog from last week I have not learned anything magical in class that would help me with the problems I have grammatically. Do not worry; I will keep you guys updated on my growing knowledge. Although, this does not apply to the problems I talked about previously I have learned some new things about apostrophes, pronouns, and other word classes. WAHOO!

In English 326, the past two weeks I have learned about apostrophes. It seemed to me that apostrophes were pretty straight forward. I thought that all a person has to do is stick one after a word and then an s to show possession of something. Or to make a word smaller or contract the word for example it is can become it’s or to make something plural like letters or numbers. These are of course very important uses of apostrophes but there is a “gray area” when it comes to these punctuations. This “gray area” comes when there is a name ending in s. The old way says to add an apostrophe and then an s. For example if there is the name Chris to make this possessive it would be Chris’s. But the new way says that you only need the apostrophe which would mean Chris becomes Chris’ when he possesses something. I find it very interesting that different magazines and newspapers do not follow just one way. The magazines use old and new depending on which specific magazine they are. I wonder if the old way will just fade out or if the new way will just fade out or if they will both always be in existence.

Over the past two weeks I have also learned about word classes. I knew what nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on are but I did not know they are called word classes. I also found it extremely interesting that some of the techniques that I learned for memorizing the word classes are not the best way. For example to remember noun I was taught to remember that they are people, places, or things. But these kinds of techniques or definitions are “COIK” or Clear Only If Known. Instead, it is better to use test sentences. An example of this would be “They want to ______” for verbs. If you cannot put the word you think is a verb into that sentence then it fits into a different word class. It is good to know as a future teacher that having explicit definitions is not always good for learning these word classes. I hope that I can learn some of these tricks to finding what word class a specific word fits into. It would be great to be able to explain this to students in a useful way.

Learning about apostrophes was a good experience. I liked learning how sometimes there are “gray areas” in grammar. Although I learned that there are good techniques to use to show students where words fit in the sense of word classes, I still feel that I could not teach them. I want to be able to use these in a classroom and feel confident that my students will understand. As I said already I hope that we learn more about these techniques. It has only been three weeks into the semester and I have already learned so much and I know that I have more to go.

Question of the week:
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to remember the little tricks we learned about word classes? or are we just supposed to have hand outs to look at?