Parts of today’s blog written by Jeremy M.

 

Today, Mrs. Scales told us that she was getting excited because when she was grading our conventions worksheet from Monday, so many of us did really well. However, when she started grading our homework from Tuesday it was a big disappointment; we hadn’t done as well as she expedited. Mrs. Scales concluded that either we didn’t have anything fun going on Monday night to interfere with us doing our homework, or we were giving each other points when we graded them in class together.  Either way, the homework results were very inconsistent from Monday to Tuesday.  So we looked back over Tuesday’s homework and reviewed each correction, one at a time.

 

Interjection, Colon, Hyphen (Single-Thought Adjectives), Apostrophe

 

Aha heres a little known fact starfish breathe through their feet.

 

Interjection error –

 

Aha! (Aha is an interjection and needs an exclamation point after it).

 

Colon error –

 

Aha! Heres a little known fact: starfish breathe through their feet. (a colon is used for emphasizing a word or phrase).

 

Hyphen (Single-Thought Adjectives) error –

 

Aha! Heres a little-known fact: starfish breathe through their feet. (the two words little and known are connected with a hyphen because they represent a single thought that is used as and adjective in the sentence).

 

Apostrophe error

 

Aha! Here’s a little-know fact: starfish breathe through their feet. (Rule # 2 on our Conventions handout under Apostrophe states: To represent omitted letters in contractions.  Instead of writing here is, you can simply add the apostrophe between the last e in here and the s in what represents is).

 

We did the same thing for every sentence on Tuesday’s homework.  The rule covering every needed correction was found in either our Conventions handout or the Write Source 2000 book under our desks. So then we went on to grade yesterday’s homework in the same way.  Everyone had to go see Mrs. Scales to give her their grade on Wednesday’s homework and explain what they were going to do to do better on tonight’s homework.

 

Five students have gotten a 9 or 10 on three homework assignments.  Because they took the time to look up the conventions rules and score so well, Levi E., Noel K., Jordan O., Corrissa S., and Katie S. don’t have to do the daily homework assignments anymore.