The Boomerang Guidelines 1112

Boomerang Guidelines© Julie Bogart; Brave Writer Welcome to the Boomerang!: This guide will help you maximize your use of the Boomerang, so keep this copy with your issues and remember to refer to it throughout the year. ! Attention::Limits to the use of The Boomerang This is your subscription. Please do not forward, Xerox, copy or resell the contents of the digital issues of the Boomerang. Direct your friends to Brave Writer so that they sign up for their own subscriptions or to purchase Already Published Issues. You may direct friends to the website to download a free sample of the Boomerang if they are interested in how it works. You may not print and resell the Boomerang at homeschooling curricula fairs or on cyber networks that recycle homeschool curricula. You may not duplicate the Boomerang for members of a co-op class, though you may use your personal copy to teach in a co-op setting. You are free to print copies for your own use and for your children. I trust you to follow these restrictions. Boomerang Guidelines Recommendations for how to manage your subscription: We recommend that you remind yourself (via calendar notifcation with an email alarm) to pick up your issues the frst week they are posted each month. We also suggest printing the issues immediately, three hole punching them, and saving them in a notebook. Save the PDFs to an external hard drive in addition to your computer hard drive for double protection. ? If your hard drive crashes or you forget to pick up a Boomerang and you’re a monthly subscriber, what should you do? You can contact Brave Writer at: subscriptions@ bravewriter.com or click here. Send a copy of your Paypal receipt (if you have it) or information about how you paid and what kind of subscription you ordered (monthly, yearly or part of a Writer’s Jungle package). We’ll verify your order and then do our best to help you get the issues you missed or lost (they will be sent via email). Reference materials:: To aid you in teaching things like punctuation, I recommend that you purchase a copy of Nitty Gritty Grammar and/or More Nitty Gritty Grammar by Edith H. Fine and Judith P. Josephson (Publisher: Ten Speed Press). You don’t need to own both and if I were to choose between them, I’d pick More Nitty Gritty Grammar because the book alphabetizes the grammar principles making it an easy-to-use reference. I do own both of them though, and like having both. These two books have very helpful explanations for grammar terms and punctuation conventions, which are also easily understood by children. When I cite the page numbers for specifc concepts in the Arrow, I abbreviate which book they come from, like this: (NGG—14) or (MNGG—167-168) You don’t have to have these books to teach punctuation. If you feel confdent in your own explanations, or already have grammar reference books you like, simply ignore these recommendations. Both of these books are widely available online and in major bookstores. - 2 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines Intended audience for the Boomerang The Boomerang is written to both parent and student. The comments on the passages for dictation are directed at the student though it is expected that mom or dad is looking over the student’s shoulder. In addition to grammar, spelling, and punctuation notes, the Boomerang also comments on the content of the story and asks questions to stimulate thinking as you read particular passages together. Please answer these orally. They are not intended for writing. Dictation:: There are several practices that help dictation instruction. If you own The Writer’s Jungle, you may reread them in Chapter 1. For the purposes of this newsletter, here are some tips to help you succeed. 1. For kids who don’t like writing (don’t like moving a pencil across a page): Begin with copywork (simply looking back and forth between the presented passage and the student’s own paper, copying the passage word for word, punctuation mark for punctuation mark, onto the student’s own page). Don’t bother using the passages as traditional dictation for at least the frst month. Use the passages as copywork only. Set the timer for seven-ten minute intervals. Explain that you want to see perfect (beautiful) transcription—no errors and beautiful writing, in the designate minutes of writing. You can slowly lengthen this period from seven to ten to twelve minutes, as you see progress and confdence grow. If your teen is a reluctant writer, feel free to start with a shorter time frame. You know your child. Be sure to balance challenge with sustainability. We want teens to participate at a level that helps them grow, but we don’t want to cause them to hate the work they do. Charlotte Mason (education philosopher from Britain, well-known in homeschool circles) states that the goal of copywork is to write legibly (beautifully) and accurately. Share these goals with your teens. We want to encourage the habit of attention and excellence. That is done by only completing work of which the student - 3 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines is proud and to which he or she has given full attention. If it means shortening the time frame for copywork so that the child stays fully attentive and engaged, then do so. The goal here isn’t quantity but full attention and quality reproduction. 2. For beginning dictation: For some students, moving from copywork to full dictation is too swift a transition. The following practice is a way to help your teen make that transition. When I lived in France, I discovered that the French use a gradual method of dictation training for their students (of all ages, right into university!). I’ve labeled one of those strategies, “French Dictation” and explain it here. Instead of requiring your student to transcribe every word of the dictation after getting used to copywork, start with the French dictation method (as practiced in France). Type out the passage on the computer in a large font with triple spaces between sentences. Choose to leave blanks for several of the words in the passage. When you frst try French dictation, leave words blank that your child already knows how to spell. Here’s an example: “As regards actual evidence, such as is necessary in court, I admit that I have none” (And Then There Were None, Christie 157). Retype it like this: “As actual , such as is in , I admit that I have none. Hand this sheet to your teen and read the passage aloud (saying all the words) in its entirety, slowly. As your teens hear you speak the words “regards” “evidence” “necessary” and “court,” they’ll read their sheet of paper with the sentence and blanks, and notice that certain words are missing from his paper. They’ll then fll in those words (regards, evidence, necessary and court) in the appropriate blanks. This method helps train your student to read, listen and write all at once, but without overwhelming the teen with too many words and punctuation conventions to keep in mind at the same time. By starting with a graduated process, you can rehabilitate a teen who is not comfortable with dictation and needs a more gradual approach. You can use this method to isolate homonym misspellings (‘here’ and ‘hear,’ or ‘they’re’ ‘their’ and ‘there,’ or ‘our’ and ‘are’). This method helps your teens hear the words in context and is then allowed to process what they have heard while making - 4 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines a specifc choice. Homonym misspellings are frequent with kids under 15 so don’t be alarmed by them. Just practice differentiating. 3. Transitional Dictation: After using French dictation, the student can transition to full dictation. Begin by using the designated passage as copywork the day before, and then using the same passage for dictation. Potentially, this could last four days if the passage is long (as they sometimes are in the Boomerang). Use two days to copy it and two days to dictate it, breaking it in half. This procedure is effective at getting high quality dictation products, but can become tedious if done this way every single week. The purpose of the transitional phase is to help your kids study the passage through copying it in order to gain familiarity with the punctuation and spelling. If your teen can simply read and reread the passage and then reproduce the passage with fewer than four or fve errors in full dictation, the step of copying over the passage on the day before dictation is unnecessary. 4. True Dictation: To ensure success, try this approach: ● Let your child review the passage before you do the dictation. Orally quiz the vocabulary words for spelling that you think will be diffcult. Ask your child to fetch a clean sheet of lined paper. The student writes his/her name in the upper right corner with the date underneath. Centered on the top line is the name of the book (underlined) and the page number. Skip a line and indent. ● When you (parent) read the dictation passage, begin by reading through the entire frst line (until an end mark). Then pause and begin again reading the frst clause or several word chunk (no more than three or four words). Wait for your kids to fnish writing that segment. Reread it if necessary. Continue to the next chunk. Do this until you have completed the frst sentence. When you reach the end of the sentence in chunks, go back to the beginning of the sentence and reread the whole sentence with proper infection to indicate commas and periods. (At this point, your kids will simply be reading along checking to be sure they got all the words onto their paper and that they are satisfed with the spelling and punctuation choices they made.) I usually pause for a comma and keep my voice infected as though the sentence isn’t over. When I come to the end of a sentence, I make sure that my pause is longer and - 5 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines that the intonation goes down. ● Keep dictating in this manner, going sentence by sentence. Sometimes I will reread a section or a couple of sentences together to help the student catch up. I also help students by rereading several times if asked. No hard and fast rules here. At the end of the passage (when your students have put their pencils down), reread the entire passage using proper infection and pausing at all end marks. Your child should feel free to make adjustments or corrections as s/he listens to that fnal reading. ● Hand the original passage to your student in order to make a comparison with the student’s handwritten work. The student is to correct all punctuation mistakes and omissions by inserting the proper mark and then circling it. The child should underline any misspelled words and then rewrite them at the bottom of the page correctly. At the end, tally up the number of mistakes and spelling errors and write —5 (or whatever amount of errors) at the top of the page in a circle. The goal is to make fewer than fve errors. 100% correct should be rewarded with something fun - TV, time off, candy, big hugs, or high fves. Really. Dictation practiced regularly will over time teach punctuation and spelling more effectively than any other tool. The trick is to do it regularly. We recommend once per week in Brave Writer, but you are free to do it twice per week as well. The only danger is that it can become tedious. When it does, try mixing it up with copywork (let them pick their own passage to copy into a copybook of famous quotes) and with Reverse Dictation (below). 5. Reverse Dictation: For a change of pace, it’s nice to let your kids act as editors rather than transcribers. Type the dictation passage (onto a Word doc) without any punctuation or capitals. Misspell a couple of key words, triple space and use a large font (16). Print the passage out and hand your kids a red pen. Their job is to insert as much punctuation as they can and to identify and then spell the misspelled words. They will underline the misspelled word and then rewrite it correctly at the bottom of the page. At the end, tally how many corrections they made that were indeed correct. Count how many words they identifed that were misspelled. Then count up the number of words they spelled correctly at the bottom of the page. Add the number of corrections (punctuation) to the number of words that they were able to spell correctly, to the number of misspellings they identifed (count - 6 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines both—one for identifying the wrong spelling and one for spelling it right). Add all these together and put the number at the top of the page (i.e. 56). Then pay your student a penny for every correction made correctly: 56 cents. Trust me: even teens love this reward. There’s no need to correct mistakes and tally the wrong marks. The purpose of reverse dictation is to evaluate how much your kids have learned about punctuating and spelling. It can be fun to tell your kids in advance how many errors there are (be sure you count two points for each misspelled word since your students have the chance to earn two points—one for identifying the misspelling and one for correcting it). That can be an incentive to keep working after they think they are fnished. On the other hand, it can be pressure for some kids. So only tell the total in advance if you have a child who enjoys that kind of competitive work. Also, in some cases, kids will make punctuation choices that work even if they aren’t the ones the author made. For instance, if your child used an ‘em’ dash instead of parenthesis, that choice is likely to be just as effective in punctuating the passage. No need to mark it wrong. Check NGG or MNGG to consider whether the choice made is acceptable. (Same goes for semi-colons and periods followed by capitals. Both of these achieve similar results and would be acceptable). Practical Tips for Correcting the Reverse Dictation Product: Once your kids have completed their reserve dictation, it’s important for them to discover what they missed. One way to do that is for you to help them zero in on their oversights without telling them what they missed. (This also works for regular dictation too, if you choose to try it.) ● You will frst reread their work to see what errors they’ve overlooked. Do not show the original to your child yet. You want them to stay engaged with the editing process a while longer. ● If there is a punctuation mark or misspelling they overlooked, start by simply mentioning that there are still X number of outstanding errors that they missed. (So for instance, you might say: “There are three errors you missed.”) Then your students will return to the page rereading the whole passage looking for those errors. ● If the student does not fnd all of them even with that urging to reread, you can help narrow the scope of the investigation to a single line. Put a check in the margin of the line with the missing punctuation or misspelling (right or left depending on which side the error is on). Then the student will only look within that line. - 7 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines ● If that isn’t enough help, next tell your student whether the error is in punctuation or spelling (to narrow the search). ● If the student still can’t fnd the mistake, run a squiggly line under the missing punctuation or misspelling (or missed capitalization, etc.) and ask your student to make the correction on the spot. (This is a great moment for a conversation, for modeling the way a comma might work better than the period currently in that space, etc.) ● Finally, if none of these works, then you can compare the corrected page to the original and let your student tell you what is different about the original compared with the printed passage he or she just edited. This step-by-step process of editing does more to help your child internalize the lessons the passage has to teach, than if you simply make the corrections yourself. So take the time to make reverse dictation a real learning opportunity. Practice reverse dictation about once a month or once every two weeks, at most. Think Pieces:: Peter Elbow (writing expert and Julie Bogart’s guru) offers some helpful ideas about levels of writing that are worth noting. He tells his faculty (who he trains to teach writing to college students) that we can assign three types of writing as educators: low, middle and high stakes writing. Low stakes writing is very familiar to Brave Writer families. Freewriting and exercises like Keen Observation and Powerful Association are the essence of low stakes writing. Students are free to explore their thoughts and ideas in writing without scrutiny of the mechanics or organization. Risk-taking is encouraged. High stakes writing is the type most of us know best from our years in school. High stakes implies that the writing will be evaluated for both form and content. Students demonstrate what they’ve learned in a selected format that they follow. Format writing means that students are both creating insight and applying a format simultaneously. This kind of structure, if introduced too early, can stife natural writing voice and original thought because students spend more time trying to match the format than thinking about what they want to say. Mature writers do well with formats. Middle stakes writing, then, strikes some kind of happy medium between these two ways of writing. He calls this kind of writing “a think piece.” Elbow says, “These are exploratory pieces that ask students to think through a topic on paper. - 8 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines They are not essays and don’t have to be organized around a single point, but they are not just messy freewriting either. They need to be cleaned up enough so they are not unpleasant to read.” He describes them as “thoughtful letters to an interested friend.” For our 7th-9th grade students, then, it is helpful if they develop this middle stakes kind of writing—that halfway house between freewriting and essays. They will develop their thinking muscles that help them to hone a point, to examine and compare one idea with another, to explore an evolving insight, and they will have the chance to get it into writing so that someone else can comment and engage the idea. Using the study questions from the Boomerang as catalysts for middle stakes writing, your students will be more prepared for the high school academic formats. How to use the Think Piece questions: Each month, 8-9 Think Piece questions will be included in the Boomerang. These make excellent, in-depth conversation starters for book discussion or think piece writing. It seems unlikely that any student would be able to (or want to!) answer them all. We offer enough questions with some analysis of the story so that students can easily select four per month (one out of two per week). Here are some ways these Think Piece questions have been used by other Brave Writer families: 1. Host a literary discussion group in your home. Invite other teens to read the novels and come prepared to discuss the book. Assign one TP question to each student and ask that student to then lead a discussion based on that topic. Bring the exploratory writing to read to the group to get the discussion going, then talk about it. (Always include brownies.) 2. Keep a literary journal. In it, write the title and author of the book, month and year it was read, and then select one TP question per week to answer. At the end of the month, add the Golden Line (explained below). By year’s end, you’ll have a nicely developed reading journal that chronicles your literature insights from an entire school year! 3. Use the TP questions for Friday Freewrites. Each Friday, instead of using the prompts on the BW blog or simply writing about any topic, evaluate whether or not there is a TP question that would be worth exploring. Freewrite about it on Friday. Then on Monday, clean it up just enough to make it presentable. You may want to do these TP freewrites on the computer to give yourself greater facility in revising and editing. No need to overly revise them. Simply clarify ambiguities, eliminate redundant ideas, fx spelling, and get rid of run-ons—that kind of thing. - 9 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer Boomerang Guidelines 4. Read the book with a parent and use the TP questions for a dialog journal. You and your mom or dad can each write your insights and then exchange them, commenting in the margins on each other’s ideas. This is a great idea for kids who have yet to discuss literature with anyone. Don’t read a book by yourself. Find some way to discuss it. 5. Teach a co-op literature discussion. You can host a literature discussion class using the Boomerang. Read the book together, assign the dictation to the students, and use the TP questions for class discussion and eventually turning some of those ideas into essays. Golden Lines:: Each month, the Boomerang encourages your student to choose one representative passage (line) from the novel of the month. Record that favorite line in a notebook. With the line, record the date, the novel title, author and location in the book. Also include a sentence or two about why that line is meaningful to the student. It doesn’t need to be profound. Over the course of the year, however, your kids will fnd that the lines they’ve chosen will speak again when they reread them later in the year. Golden Lines can be a wonderful habit to develop as a way to recall and remember a loved book. For many kids raised on coypwork, Golden Lines is the logical evolution and leads to a lifetime of savoring great quotes! - 10 - © 2011-2012 - Julie Bogart - Brave Writer