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Character and Setting Writing Prompts
Creative writing prompts for your students (120 worksheets in all). These fun creative writing prompts involve a given character (from history, mythology, etc.) and a given setting. The student has to write a story about, or from the perspective of, the character in the given setting. An example: Write a story about a werewolf in a galaxy far, far away. Another example: Cinderella in a logging camp. -
Alien Observer Worksheets
A fun creative writing exercise for your students. Creative writing prompts (100 in all) for your English students. They are tasked with describing an activity or object on Earth as if they were an alien scout sent to describe everything on Earth to their fellow aliens. -
Puppy Dog Tails Worksheets
Give your students these fun writing exercises for a different kind of creative writing assignment. The students have to create a recipe for three occupations per worksheet (over 100 worksheets in all!), similar to the poem in which boys are made of "snips, snails, and puppy dog tails". -
Dull Product Advertisement Worksheets
A creative writing and art assignment for your students. Students have to create an advertisement for an otherwise-dull household product like bow ties and door knobs. 100 prompts in all.Visit A Tasteful Cliche | Read the rest of the AVKO Blog | Visit the AVKO website
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Creative Writing Worksheets from A Tasteful Cliché - for only $2.99 each
Monday, August 2, 2010
You Can't Teach what You Know if You Don't Know You Know It
You Can't Teach
what You Know if You Don't Know You Know It Video
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Meet and Greet Times with Don McCabe Available!
- Johannesburg, South Africa, August 10-12
- Cape Town, South Africa, August 13 -17
- Sydney, Australia (available in the evenings Thursday & Friday, October 21 and 22.
- Available from 10am to 4 pm Fjordland, New Zealand Tuesday October 26.
- Available from 10 am to 4pm Fort Chalmers, New Zealand Wednesday, October 27.
- Available 10 am to 4pm Akarroa, New Zealand October 28. Available 10-4, Wellington New Zealand 10/29.
- Available 10-4 Auckland, NZ, 10/31.
- Availale11-3, Suva Fiji 11/3. 10-2, Pago Pago 11/4.
- 11-2, Moorea, French Polynesia 11/7.
- 11-2, Papeete, Taihiti, French Polynesia, 11/8
- 11-2, Bora Bora, French Polynesia, 11/9
- 10-5 Honolulu, Hawaii. 11/14
- 11-2 Maui (Lahaina), USA 11/15
Saturday, May 1, 2010
Monday, August 17, 2009
Bind Your Own Books at Home
BindingBooksBeautifully.com has ready-to-go packages for you to use to make your own books at home.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Become an Institutional Member Today
AVKO has recently revamped Institutional Membership, increasing the resources offered as well as the discount. Everyone can become an Institutional Member, not just schools, non-profits, tutoring centers, etc. and can reap the benefits.
The newest e-books are available for free download with Institutional Membership, including the Word Family Supplements 1-7 (that correspond to each of the levels of Sequential Spelling) and the Spelling Remediation Test Kit (which has 17 pre-tests, diagnostic tests, and prescriptive tests for remediation and evaluation of spelling and reading level). Additionally, Institutional Members have read-only access to all of the other AVKO materials (excluding Sequential Spelling and Engaging Language Kits). They can read and use the entire books of the other AVKO supplemental and reference materials from the internet, but cannot download or print them.
Benefits of AVKO Institutional Membership
Institutional Membership is open to individuals as well as tutoring centers, schools, learning centers, homeschool resource centers, etc.
- Access to all of the benefits of AVKO's Individual Membership (see below)
- 25% discount off all materials ordered
- Read-only access to ALL AVKO curriculum materials (except for Sequential Spelling and Engaging Language Kits)
- Access to AVKO's newest e-books:
- Word Family Supplements 1-7 for Sequential Spelling
- Spelling Remediation Test Kit
Monday, July 27, 2009
New AVKO Resource: Sequential Spelling Word Family Supplement E-books
Friday, July 24, 2009
New AVKO Resource for Testing Spelling and Reading Levels
AVKO has introduced a new e-book resource: a collection of diagnostic, prescriptive, and pre-tests for spelling and reading. This collection of 17 tests written by Don McCabe will allow you to quickly determine which spelling patterns your students need to learn, where they should be placed in Sequential Spelling (or another spelling program), and how to best remediate their spelling. This collection will also give you all of the information you need to quickly create your own spelling program. These tests can also be used for ESL instruction, special education, creating an IEP, and many other things!
This is available for purchase from AVKO for only $5.00 from the Scribd website. You can see all of AVKO's documents on Scribd here.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Engaging Language Kit by Brian McCabe Sample on Scribd
Learn more about AVKO's Engaging Language Kits by Brian McCabe. Check out this sample of the various language arts activities that your students will have fun -- and learn -- with below.
381 Sample
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Activities Inspired by Harry Potter
Today, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince opens in theatres everywhere. Regardless of your opinions of the films or books, it's undeniable what they have done to re-instill a love of reading in our nation's kids. In the spirit of Harry Potter, I'd like to propose a few summer activities for reading and language arts:
The Importance of Names:
One of the great things about the Harry Potter series is the ubiquitous presence of names that have some deeper significance or reference: Argus Filch, Minerva McGonagall, etc. See these sites for more information on the names and possible references:
Challenge your students to pay attention to names in the other books, movies, and pop culture they take in. Names carry a lot of meaning and can be in homage to many things, and can give rich, though subtle, contour to an oeuvre.
Summer Reading Contests:
Summer is traditionally a time for lots of pleasure reading. Challenge your students to read as much as they can over the summer months. You may want to have a reward system for them. Or, you can have them set their own goals. Or, you can contact your local library or school district to see what kinds of competitions they have in place for the students.
Mythology and Personification:
Throughout the Harry Potter series, many mythological creatures and characters are referred to. We have werewolves, giants, vampires, references to Minerva and Argus, etc. How about giving a lesson on the popular myths (Greco-Roman, Norse, Native American, fables, fairy tales) that are pervasive in our culture? Knowledge of these myths is important for the understanding of much classical literature as they are referred to time and time again.
Manytimes, mythological characters are the personified forms of inanimate objects or abstractions (love, war, hearth, wind, fate, etc.) It's interesting to see how different cultures have personified these different abstractions. You can challenge your student to compare various abstractions across different cultures' mythology or even create their own mythological characters personifying an abstraction of their choice. These can make great art projects or creative writing projects. You can also challenge your students to think of a "creation myth" for some object, event, place, etc. This is especially common in the Native American mythologies (e.g., the creation of the Sleeping Bear dunes in Michigan).
- Mythology on Wikipedia - Scroll down to the "Lists" section.
- D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths
- More Native American Mythology
Friday, July 10, 2009
Brain Rules by John J. Medina
Blog by Gloria Goldsmith
I was tickled pink when I stumbled across Medina’s website. I bought the book the very next morning. I was delighted by the 12 brain rules he has come up with though his scientific inquiry. Mind you, he is a developmental molecular biologist focused on the genes involved in the human brain development. He insists on his research being published in a peer-review journal and successfully replicated before he included the study in the Brain Rules book. That means the information he shares with us isn’t just theories that he has invented, it is real science, and I am delighted to say, presented in a meaningful and extremely readable manner. Plus, the biggest clincher for me was the fact that it parallels all the methods of teaching that we, at the AVKO Foundation, have been encouraging parents and teachers to use, recognize, and perform for over 35 years. It is great to see it confirmed in another form of scientific tests.
Attention | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things. What we pay attention to is profoundly influenced by memory.
One method AVKO advocates which helps a student concentrate is ten to fifteen minute lessons. AVKO even encourages the use of a timer when doing lessons. Medina goes on and on about how humans need something to grab our attention about every 10 minutes in order to keep us interested. AVKO promotes that after any academic lesson students need some form of physical release. Exercise!
Exercise | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power. The greatest predictor of successful aging is the presence or absence of a sedentary lifestyle.
AVKO encourages exercise of some kind, many times during the school day, especially for ADHD kids. We think a 15 -20 minute break helps to drop the anxiety levels some humans feel when attempting to learn something difficult. Coming back to a lesson after a refreshing energy boost pause, makes it easier to tackle. According to John Medina, ALL humans perform better with some form of daily exercise. Our memory is better with cardiovascular fitness.
Survival | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too. There is no greater anti-brain environment than the classroom and cubicle
Homeschoolers, you may well have a deeper connection to the truth of this rule than most parents whose children are in public school. It wasn’t just our bodies that adopted from swinging in the trees to walking on the savannahs, our brain also had to evolve to survive, solve new problems, learn from mistakes, and create alliances with other peoples in order to survive. Humans now rule the world because we learned to cooperate and formed teams with our neighbors. Yet if we do not feel safe with our neighbor, boss or teacher, we may not perform as well under their leadership. Isolation in learning does not create an open learning environment in which questions are welcomed.
Short-Term memory is Rule #5: Repeat to remember. The human brain can hold about seven pieces of information for less than 30 seconds!
If you want to prolong the 30 seconds a few minutes or a few hours, you will need to re-expose yourself to the information again and again. Memories are so volatile that you have to repeat to remember. This fact has long been a staple in AVKO’s Sequential Spelling program. The presentation of word families (same sound/same spelling) teaches the student to recall using the logic of spelling patterns (in, pin, sin, spin), as well as the repetition of sequentially spelling the base word plus a different tense each day (pin, pins, pinned, pinning). AVKO also encourages parents to revisit the target word in The Patterns of English Spelling, Word Families in Sentence Context, and use the patterned approach of Let’s Write Right, or Individualized Typing. We encourage parents to let the student practice their spelling words in word games by going to SpellingCity.com where the student can type in current spelling words and Spelling City forms them into several different word games. Fun and repetition! AVKO supports all of these review methods which re-exposes the student to the target word repeatedly, just as Medina advocates for short-term and long-term memory to take place.
There are 12 brain rules. I won’t go over all of them here, but I do encourage you to get the book, and read this fascinating subject for yourself. I know it will create a clearer understanding of how people learn and what you can do to effect faster learning and how to avoid things that impair learning. John Medina also has a web site (www.brainrules.net) that explains a lot about his book. It is deliberately done in a very amusing style, because as he said, we recall things better when they have made an impression.
Grammar Untied -- A Featured Website
Grammaruntied.com, formerly known as Tongue Untied, is a great website! It covers a wide range of topics, and offers instructions related to basic grammar, sentence structure, and word choice, as well as rules for punctuation. It covers all the aspects of English language and is an excellent online guide.
This website was originally developed for students who want to take Journalism as a major at college level. However, it can be used by people of all ages whether young or old.
The website’s layout is simple but effective, making it appealing. The website has information you need in a design that is easy to read and understand. This information can easily be navigated by using the clear instructions present for the users. There are two menus on the home page of the website; one is on the left side of the page and the other on the top of the page. The left menu provides links to explanations in each of the major components of English grammar while the top menu offers links to quizzes, curriculum, and discussion. There are seven tabs on the top menu, each one directing the user to another page that contains more information.
For each concept covered, it starts with a brief description of the theory and provides excellent examples and interactive quizzes. For example, the page on adjectives tells you what adjectives are, followed by a practice exercise on adjectives, and an interactive quiz. By doing such quizzes, the users can find out how proficient they are in English language. A very interesting element present on the website is an image that reads “Grammar Warning Ahead”, by clicking on this image the user is directed to a new page with topics like “Top Ten Most Commonly Confused Words.”
There is a ten week curriculum on the website. Each week a topic is extensively covered, with its explanation, and its types followed by homework and example quizzes. If this curriculum is properly followed, it can produce meritorious results by the end of the tenth week.
The website is very impressive and is recommended to anyone teaching, learning or polishing their English. The content is exceptionally good, and everyone can benefit from the enormous amount of material on it.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Getting Your Kids Interested in Current Events
See AVKO's previous post on collage or découpage (with words) for information on how to do these crafts.
If your students are surrounded by the images of countries, cities, and cultures -- and learn about them -- they will be more interested in learning more about them in the future. You can find maps in old issues of National Geographic (you can always find back issues at used bookstores, estate sales, antique stores, etc.).
- Take advantage of the news sites for kids and adolescents. Many of them have worksheets you can use for your homeschooling as well.
Check out:
Nick News
Channel One
Scholastic News Online
Time for Kids
- Teach your kids how to read the newspaper
About.com has a nice introduction to newspaper terms that will help in navigating the newspaper for the first time. Explain how there is a difference in perceived importance of the articles based on their placement in the paper. What's on the first page? Are there big pictures? How much space is devoted to the piece?
Explain the difference between news articles, editorials, letters to the editor, and op-eds. Explain bias. You may want to do some high order thinking exercises with your students in helping them parse out what in a piece is biased, how its biased, and what you may be able to infer about the author based on the slant that is taken in a piece.
Use the political cartoons as additional exercises in abstract thought and discussion starters.
Have your students write a little recap of a news article at least once a week. You can choose to assign a topic (foreign affairs, politics, op-ed, environment, etc.) or have it be a free for all of what interests them.
- Introduce the Fake News sources, if you wish, to make the news more fun. Obviously, there may be more discretion needed here to decide what is suitable for your individual setting / student. However, political satire and "fake news" programs are extremely popular in today's popular culture. You may decide to take a more intellectual / analytical approach with these and use clips or excerpts as examples of satire, parsing out what is sarcastic (or sardonic), etc.
The Onion
The Daily Show
The Colbert Report
Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update
Chocolate News
Storytelling with your Children
Younger students love to tell stories, even if it's just sharing what they did that day, what they learned at school, or a silly story they've made up. Take advantage of the children's natural curiosity and creativity -- and boost their language skills -- by writing the stories out.
For younger students, you can have them dictate the stories while you transcribe them. If you have a motor mouth on your hands, you may wish to use a tape recorder or your computer to allow their creative juices to keep flowing naturally (instead of halted waiting for you to finish writing/typing the last sentence). You may need to ask a few questions along the way to get them to elaborate on their descriptions, what happened next, how the characters relate to each other, etc.
Once you have it all written/typed out, put it in a binder. Have your child draw the illustrations and/or the cover. Collect the stories in the same binder or keep them stored together if they are in multiple bindings. A week or so later (and at later intervals, too), you can have the children read the stories back to you or read them silently.
This is a great way for the children to see their own vocabulary words in print, and in the context of full sentences that are syntactically and grammatically correct, reinforcing their language building skills.
They may decide that they want to revise the stories later on -- adding more detail, adding new characters, or creating sequels to the stories. Encourage this!
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Brain Rules
Brain Rules, a new book, extolls the essence of what AVKO's philosophy is all about with psychological and biological research evidence.
AVKO recommends that you check out this wonderful and readable book about how we think, how we best learn, and what doesn't work in our present educational and professional systems for our own brains.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Make a Collage...or Découpage with Words
Read the Rest of the AVKO Blog | Visit the AVKO Website
Friday, June 19, 2009
Teaching Handwriting and Vocabulary Through the Backdoor of Spelling
Sequential Spelling is organized in clumps of 4 lessons, where 2-4 word families are taught in each clump. In those 4 lessons, the base words remain the same, but the various derivative forms (declentions) are taught in lessons 2-4 of the clumps. Instead of just teaching each of the lessons "in a vacuum," you can take advantage of the repetition to teach the other facets of language arts: handwriting, vocabulary, keyboarding, dictation, etc.
Teach the first lesson normally. You want the first lesson to be undiluted. Some handwriting practice, vocabulary learning, etc. will occur naturally because of the repetition of the word family patterns and the exposure to new words in their sentence context. We want the students to focus on just spelling the words the first time; let them do what they do automatically.
For the next lessons, you can instruct your student to focus on something additional -- making the strokes of the letters neatly, learning the vocabulary, typing speed and accuracy (you can have them type the words instead of writing them out), etc. As you progress through the lessons in the word family clump, you can divide their attention more as they will require less attention paid to the spelling.
Read the Rest of the AVKO Blog | Visit the AVKO Website
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Homeschool Depot -- the Craigslist for Homeschooling Curriculum!
Dear Homeschool Families,
Do you happen to have some homeschool curriculum or resources that you no longer need? Do you need additional homeschool curriculum or resources and wish to purchase it pre-owned at a greatly reduced price?
If so, wouldn’t it be great if there was one single place where homeschool families across the nation could get together to buy and sell each other’s resources?
As a homeschool family ourselves, we think this is a great idea. In fact, we have taken the first step to create such a place. It’s an online access point called Storehousedepot.com. We developed it is a safe place for homeschool families to easily buy and sell resources and materials directly from other homeschool families.
We invite you to visit StorehouseDepot.com, sign up for free, and try it out for yourself. Just click on the logo below or type “storehousedepot.com” in your web browser…it’s that easy!
As you join the "Storehouse Community" we hope that we can help you connect, share, and save as good stewards of God's wisdom and knowledge.
Sincerely,
The StorehouseDepot Team
Follow-up from Josiah (Featured student in To Teach a Dyslexic Video)
Sincerely Josiah
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Using Spelling to Teach Reading
This is the second AVKO Sequential Spelling book I've bought. We're just finishing the first one, and I have to say, I'm really impressed. My son has dyslexia and has a terrible time reading. Before we starting the Spelling One book, he could barely read at all. After finishing the first book, his reading has improved dramatically. I was truly amazed. I didn't get the spelling book to help with his reading, but instead because I liked the way it taught spelling. And he is learning to spell and doing great at it, BUT, the book also helped him with reading. - Sue M.
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