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-to’s to make your student’s critical writing skills strong. Take the 6/7-2 course with this course to gain a full semester’s credit of writing.
Total classes: 6
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.
Special Notes: Course materials are provided free for this course. This course is scheduled during several different time slots. Choose the day and time that works best for your family.
This is the first of a 4-part series. Students are expected to complete the full MS 6/7 Series (each course is a separate registration).
Description
This is an essential writing course for all middle school students — to help master the foundations of punctuation and grammar with tips, tricks, and expertise that helps your student know how to use punctuation and grammar correctly. This foundational course can help your student overcome struggles with commas, semicolons, colons, and more — tackling the most challenging ideas within punctuation and grammar for middle school students — to 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: Solid commas in a series and commas with conjunctions
Class 2: Solid commas within clauses and tough constructions
Class 3: Solid tense, competing punctuation, and quotations
Class 4: Sticky-pair sentence construction (if-then, not only-but also) and tough grammar
Class 5: Using colons and semicolons correctly
Class 6: Introducing tricky punctuation details and end punctuation
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 (1) to three (3) 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.
Important Dates
Class Dates and Starting Times:
Mondays, September 9 to Oct. 14, 2024.
11:30 AM Eastern (10:30 Central; 9:30 Mountain; 8:30 Pacific)
OR
Wednesdays, Sept. 11 to Oct. 16, 2024.
10:00 AM Eastern (9:00 Central; 8:00 Mountain; 7:00 Pacific)
OR
Thursdays, Sept. 12 to Oct. 17, 2024.
10:00 AM Eastern (10:30 Central; 9:30 Mountain; 8:30 Pacific)
Duration per class: 50 minutes
