Sentence a Day: Short, Playful Proofreading Exercises to Help Students Avoid Tripping up When They Write »

Samantha Prust has contributed materials for many language arts textbooks. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

These brisk and humorous one-sentence examples of writing mistakes provide teachers with what are often called "daily oral language" exercises that help students master the basics of capitalization, mechanics, punctuation, and usage. Such quick mini-lessons can become boring when the sentence comes from another classroom subject such as science, but this book's punchy declarations get kids' attention and keep the focus on writing. Each exercise includes an at-a-glance summary of skills addressed, as well as quick ideas and tips to help students understand basic grammar concepts.

KLIATT

The author contributes to language arts textbooks and has an MFA degree in creative writing. She is hoping with this book to encourage careful proofreading by suggesting a sentence each day that needs to be corrected. Prust writes that each sentence to be corrected is "short, playful, interesting... with a sense of humor." She suggests that teachers spend a few minutes each day correcting one sentence; students on their own could tackle one sentence a day, or do as many sentences as they want to do at one sitting, like a puzzle book. The sentence to be corrected is given first. Next is the corrected sentence. Finally, there are brief notes about the topics tackled in the example. Here is a sample exercise: "If you sit at you're computer two much. You might turn into a mouse potato." The topics covered are spelling common words that sound alike and sentence fragments. As we all know, writing incorrectly is a widespread problem in our culture; any approach that might help students improve their skills is welcome.