Typing

Students have been blogging throughout the year and I'm excited to see their progress. It seems to me that overall their posts have become more thoughtful and they seem to look forward to our blogging days.

 

I noticed that when students made grammatical errors, they did not always notice during the writing process. I think our capitalization and punctuation might improve if we spend a little more time focusing on typing. Students will now have a little time to practice time each week, but they are more than welcome to practice at home too!

We are using www.typingweb.com, and students have their log-in information. Feel free to check the site out and encourage your students to practice ... especially with both hands in the right place. :)

Here are the lessons they will be working on in the beginner portion:



Figuring MLA Out

This week, students have been working to format a paper using MLA Style, which is set by the Modern Language Association. They will be using this in high school and we will be using MLA Style later in the year to cite the sources that we find. Thanks for answering any questions they might have had at home when formatting their documents!

Below is a picture of students playing a game to make us familiar with MLA headings. We turned our desks into a sheet of computer paper and laid out the pages silently, so there were multiple hand signals going on!

For the rest of the year, we'll be distinguishing between plagiarizing and paraphrasing so students know how to handle a source when they use it.

 

MLA Basics

This week, we're working with citing things using MLA. When guessing what MLA stood for (Modern Language Association), students suggested My Loving Armpit or Michigan Lakes Association. :)

I know we'll have some learning curves because this type of formatting is new for all the students, but check out this video from Purdue's Online Writing Lab, which is also a great source for information! Eventually, we will move into works cited pages.