Lesson Prep
Big Objective: I will guide my students to be engaged, mindful, and purposeful thinkers and writers through the process of writing.
Lesson Objective: Through lecture and practice exercises, students will learn about 4 methods to improve their paper’s style. They will finish with a peer review of their 3 page draft.
My prep: About Me Sheets, peer review groups, peer review sheets; Google slides
Student prep: Multimodal Learning Contract
Lesson Presentation
Housekeeping (10 Minutes)
- 5 min: 2 about me sheets
- Instructor ratings are open: 5 pts. Extra credit for doing it.
- 5 min: Explain 1st peer review:
- When to email (monday)
- When comments are due (Friday)
- Go over sheet, explain how to make comments in word and track changes
- Go over pairings and groups. Go ahead and get with your partner and exchange emails.
Style Techniques (see slides here)
5 min: Review Old/New Flow: Show paragraph and they work with partner to improve old/new.
10 min: Topic Sentence and Flow
How to make a good topic sentence through old/new (see slides)
Examples
Organization: Breaking Things into Two+ Paragraphs
Can you add transition phrases to break this reallllly long paragraph into multiple paragraphs? Can you make the topic sentence flow from one idea to the next?
Overarching Topic: research shows that screen time is detrimental for young children.
Look through it as a class, identifying shifts in the topics. Once those shifts are identified, work in groups of 3 to apply old new information to create flow as you transition from paragraph to paragraph.
Reduce words (10 minutes)
How:
- Look for nominalizations
- Look for metadiscourse. Do you need it? Can another phrase work.
Exercise 1: Rewrite the following in as few words as possible. (on slideshow)
Continued Peer Discussion of your 3 pages (or as many as you have) 15 minutes
Look for the moves in these paragraphs or pick your weakest stylistic thing and have it peer checked for that.
