Ready-to-Use Paragraph Writing Activities: Unit 3, Vol. 3 »

Jack Umstatter, a master English teacher with over 25 years' experience, is a multiple winner of the Teacher of the Year award. He currently teaches English in the Cold Spring Harbor School District in New York and educationand literature at Dowling College in Oakdale, New York. He is the author of Brain Games!, Hooked on English! and other practical teacher resources published by The Center.

This resource is one of six units in the Writing Skills Curriculum Library, a practical series that provides over 540 stimulating, ready-to-use activity sheets to help you teach and reinforce writing skills in middle/junior high and senior high school students, grades 6-12.

Each unit in the series focuses on a different area of writing skills and is complete and self-contained, including 90 reproducible activities in a variety if formats, a brief teacher's guide to effective use of the activities, and full answer keys. The activities can be used in any order in any developmental or corrective writing program to meet the specific needs of individual students, small groups, or an entire class.

For quick selection, each unit includes a detailed table of contents listing the major skills/topics covered in that unit followed by the activities for teaching and reinforcing each skill. Here's just an overview of what you'll find each unit:

Unit 1 READY-TO-USE WORD ACTIVITIES provides 90 activity sheets to help students learn the importance of word selection and precision in the writing process. Topics covered include connotation and denotation, roots, prefixes and suffixes, synonyms and antonyms, and expressions that students' awareness of making correct word choices.

Unit 2 READY-TO-USE SENTENCE ACTIVITIES presents 90 activities that involve students in the essentials of sentence construction, subjects and predicates, complements, phrases, clauses, types of sentences, agreement, and mechanics as well as problems of wordiness, transition, ambiguity, and more.

Unit 3 READY-TO-USE PARAGRAPH WRITING ACTIVITIES features 90 stimulating activities that lead students through the steps of writing clear, convincing paragraphs. Topics range from brainstorming techniques and topic sentences to using supporting ideas and introducing, organizing, and concluding the paragraph.

Unit 4 READY-TO-USE PREWRITING & ORGANIZATION ACTIVITIES offers 90 reproducible activities that explore ways of gathering and using information intelligently. Activities cover a wide range of topics such as information sources, categorizing, topic and subtopic summaries, outlines, and term paper ideas and formats.

Unit 5 READY-TO-USE REVISION & PROOFREADING ACTIVITIES presents 90 high-interest activities to guide students through the problem areas of writing including verb tense, word often confused, superfluity, issues of clarity, and proofreading techniques used by professional writers.

Unit 6 READY-TO-USE PORTFOLIO DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES includes 90 activities that expose students to different types of writing such as literary analysis, stories and sketches, narratives, reviews, letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, character analysis, dialogue writing, essays, and commercials.

Together, the six units in the Writing Skills Curriculum Library give you an unparalleled store of tested, ready-to-use exercises for building skills in all aspects of writing. They will help your students learn the elements of effective writing and enjoy the experience at the same time.

About the Writing Skills Curriculum Library.
About Unit 3.
Teacher's Correction Marks.
SECTION ONE: STARTING UP.
SECTION TWO: BECOMING MORE EFFICIENT.
SECTION THREE: GENERATING IDEAS.
SECTION FOUR: ZEROING IN.
SECTION FIVE: DEVELOPING SKILLS.
SECTION SIX: IMAGINING THINGS.
Answer Key.