Carnegie Notes from Nov. 14^th through Nov. 18^th

This week we did comma rules, with one slide show covering all the comma rules except “who, which, and that” and a separate slide show on that. Overall, I believe the lesson was clear for them. The slides were simple, with a little practice at the end of each. For each show, we did one rule and then covered exercises from the book matching that rule. I liked the pacing of it. The problem now is that we’ve developed no WebCT exercises for commas. I have many worksheets for them to practice with, but no time to correct all their editing. I believe that especially for something as memorization intensive as commas, they need to be able to drill. My plan is to develop at least two fairly easy quizzes for each rule (around 10 rules) and then a progression of more difficult quizzes integrating all rules (the student would have to choose all the sentences with correctly used commas, for instance). On Friday, we wrote papers. A few still have numerous run-ons in their papers, and many did not check for spelling errors and had problems with the homonyms (their, they’re, there, etc.). I may have to review run-ons again before the semester ends.