This is our catalog of courses. We will occasionally adjust the course listing to reflect the addition of new courses and the retirement of others.
Help your middle school student gain confidence and master must-have skills for writing with this excellent foundational punctuation and grammar course — using specific helps, tips, and how-tos to make your student’s critical writing skills strong.
Total Classes: 6
Duration: 50 minutes per class
Prerequisite: No class prerequisite.
Suggested Grade Level: 7th or accelerated 6th grade
Suggested Credit: One-half (½) of a semester’s credit for Writing or English. Follow with MS 6/7-2 for a full semester credit. To make a full and complete year of middle school writing, sign up for the 6/7-3 and 6/7-4 courses that follow.
Description
This is an essential writing course to help master the foundations of punctuation and grammar with tips, tricks, and expertise that helps your student know how to correctly use punctuation and grammar in all middle school writing. Get rid of struggles with commas, semicolons, colons, and more by tackling the most challenging ideas within punctuation and grammar for middle school students, so your student can become confident and comfortable using punctuation and grammar well in all writing. Sign up for the companion course that follows this course, Writing Essentials 2: Excellent Sentence & Paragraph Writing I (MS 6/7-2), for a full semester of middle school writing.
Outline
Class 1: Mastering commas in a series; mastering commas with conjunctions
Class 2: Mastering commas with “by the way clausettes”; mastering commas with tough constructions
Class 3: Using tense (What it is and how to correctly use it); identifying competing punctuation (what it is and how to avoid it); quotation marks (how to correctly use them!)
Class 4: Mastering “tricky-pair” sentence construction (if-then, not only-but also, and more); identifying (and working with) tough grammar constructions
Class 5: Using colons and semicolons correctly
Class 6: Mastering tricky punctuation details; “right way” end punctuation and spacing
Materials and Homework
Course Materials: Course materials are included free as PDF files. Word or the ability to convert a document to a Word-compatible document is required. If you do not own Microsoft Word, you can use a system such as Google Docs that converts to Word documents FREE.
Homework: This course has weekly quizzes, with an estimated one to three hours per week for homework outside of class time (depending on the student’s skill level upon entering the course). Quizzes are graded automatically by the computer for instant feedback.
