Notebook templates allow students to demonstrate subject mastery by creating and illustrating their own original examples.
SYNTAX FOR SAILORS NAVIGATING THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
AN EXTRAORDINARY LANGUAGE ARTS RESOURCE
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It's one thing to be able to identify selected worksheet elements. It's something else again to use these elements correctly and effectively in original sentences. If our goal is to arm student writers and speakers with a vast arsenal of syntactic weaponry, shouldn't we expect them to "test fire" these elements in a real world setting?
Writing things down is a great way to learn. Simply providing a copy of the lesson notes without having the student transcribe them into a notebook presupposes that this information will somehow be transferred osmotically from a sheet of notebook paper stuffed in a back pocket to the appropriate areas of the cranium. This information needs to be assimilated and processed both visually and aurally.
"Hey Mr. Miller! Guess what? I still have my English Notebook!" (I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've heard this familiar refrain from so many of my now "grown up" former students.)
Copyright Bill Miller 2020