Ready-to-Use Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities

This volume of <b>Ready-to-Use Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities</b> gives classroom teachers and language arts specialists a powerful and effective tool for addressing curriculum standards and competencies at the eighth-grade level and preparing their students for comprehensive assessment testing. <p><b>Writing Proficiency Lessons & Activities</b> books are also available from Jossey-Bass at the fourth-grade level and the tenth-grade level.</p> <p>Included are a variety of easy-to-use, reproducible activity sheets that provide application and review the basic language skills as well as extensive practice in producing the types of writing called for in standardized tests.</p> <p>For easy use, the 240-plus student activity sheets are printed in a big 8-1/2″ x 11″ format that lays flat for photocopying. The activities are organized into nine sections. Here is just a sample of the topics covered in Sections 1-5:</p> <ul> <li><b>CHOOSING THE RIGHT WORD</b>: words often confused, prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, adverbs vs. adjectives, sensory words, similes, metaphors, and double negatives</li> <li><b>MAKING MECHANICS AND USAGE WORK FOR YOU</b>: apostrophes, hyphens, end marks, commas, semicolons, colons, quotation marks, titles, and misplaced modifiers.</li> <li><b>WRITING SENTENCES</b>: subjects and predicates, subject-verb agreement, simple and compound sentences, complex sentences, sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and sentence types</li> <li><b>WRITING PARAGRAPHS</b>: writing a topic sentence, writing a concluding sentence, developing the topic, using tense consistently, using transitional words, and staying on the topic<br /> </li> <li><b>ESSAY-WRITING TECHNIQUES</b>: brainstorming, clustering, outlining, writing an introductory paragraph with a question or a surprising statement, developing the topic using examples, avoiding irrelevant details, writing a concluding paragraph, proofreading, and writing a five-paragraph essay.</li> </ul>