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Technique |
How... |
| 1 |
Ask to the child to write some words.
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You can start with some words that were worked on in a phonics lesson, or choose some from a vocabulary list. |
| 2 |
Notice in Word that a red squiggly line appears under a word that is not spelled correctly.
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Let the child try to figure out the correct spelling without your help. The red squiggly simply tells him/her to try again. |
| 3 |
Write some sentences using the word.
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Talk about capital letters at the beginning and for proper names and acronyms. Talk about punctuation. |
| 4 |
To work on vocabulary with writing, you might pick a simple word in what was written and use a thesaurus to find a word the child doesn't know.
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Explain that it is definitely NOT the point to use a harder word when a simpler one will do. Rather, that they should be aware of these other words when they read, and that they should be able to use these words when they are more descriptive for their own purposes when they write. Talk about the shades of meaning of the word and why an author might choose to use one word rather than another. |
| 5 |
To work on grammar/usage, you might pick a couple of simple sentences and use a conjunction to join them.
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For example, rewrite "He saw the toaster on the floor. He asked her if she was mad." as "When he saw the toaster on the floor, he asked her if she was mad." or "He saw the toaster on the floor, so he asked her if she was mad." or "He asked her if she was mad because he saw the toaster on the floor."... |
| 6 |
If run-on sentences are the problem, try breaking them up.
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For example, rewrite "She came in and she saw that everything was a mess and the toaster was burning the toast and that made her mad and so she threw it on the floor." as a set of shorter sentences. |
| 7 |
If sentence fragments are a problem, note that they are often used in fiction, but they need to know when to use them, and they should avoid them in writing nonfiction.
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For example, "fox in socks" is great in Dr. Seuss, but not so great in a report on what foxes look like. |
| 8 |
You can check spelling and grammar in Word by selecting the text you want to check, then click 'tools' and select 'spelling and grammar' (or you can select the text and then hit the F7 key).
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This will walk through the text and find words not in the dictionary. These might be proper names or other words that don't happen to be in the dictionary. You can click 'ignore' to ignore that one word, or 'ignore all' to ignore all instances of the word. The checker will also find some grammatical problems, like repeated words, very long sentences, and so on. Frequently it is right, but it is not very unusual for it to be wrong. |
| 9 |
You can also get some readability statistics if you have a couple of paragraphs written. These statistics will show up when you check grammar and spelling as above if the option is turned on.
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You can turn on the option by clicking on 'tools' then selecting 'options'. On the dialog box that shows up, select the 'spelling and grammar' tab, and in the 'grammar' section check the 'show readability statistics' box. |
| 10 |
If it's turned on you will see counts (words, characters, sentences, paragraphs), averages (sentences per paragraph, words per sentence, characters per word), and 3 measures of readability (the percent of passive sentences, a measure from impossible (0%) to easy (100%) and a grade level estimate.
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You may not want to share this information with the child, because they are only estimates and can be confusing. But you might want to look at sample sentences written by the child to see if you think the vocabulary and grammar of the child are improving. |
