An Annotated Resources Page for Teaching Developmental Writing
A Project of the VCCS Tidewater Region Center for Teaching Excellence Workshops:
"Developmental Writing Teaching Certificate Series"

Brain-Compatible Teaching

• Rita Smilkstein's basic resources on teaching and tutoring using the brain based natural human learning process on this page:
• "12 Principles for Brain-Based Learning" from The Talking Page Literacy Organization

Grammar and punctuation words crossword puzzle found in the Internet TESL Journal: What a great site that is!  Those ESL teachers are amazing. Check these Crossword Puzzles for ESL Instruction.  Take those menu links at the top of the page.  Holy cow—what a wealth of resources this is for everything on grammar!

Parts of Speech before going in depth on sentence boundary lessons, it's necessary to reviw some of the basics, like the parts of speech.

• Prepositions and prepositional phrases.  Rita Smilkstein's methods for teahcing granmmar begin with identifying prepositions and prepositional phrases. If that sounds rinky-dink, think about this: they are easy to identify, and once all the  nouns and pronouns that are objects of the phrases are identified, likely the noun or pronoun that’s left is the subject of the sentence.  And the prepositions are pretty easy to recognize because the list is not very extensive (appx 150).  Here’s a short list, and the Wikipedia looks like it may have all of them.

Schoolhouse Rock. Tthis sounds goofy, but music is a great memory aid (i.e., how did YOU learn the alphabet?), it gets endorphins flowing in the brain, and a lot of our students recognize the songs.  This site is informative in that it has all the lyrics, and on each individual page is a link to the video for that lesson. (“Conjunction junction, what’s your function . . .”)

Sentence combining sites 

• This portion of my favorite online handbook, the Guide to Grammar and Writing, has a good handbook-like discussion of sentence combining methods, and at the bottom a few exercises in which the students have to type the reconstructed sentences.  
• And this page at About.com has dozens of links to instructions about sentence combining and dozens of links to exercises.  With these exercises, I have students copy and paste the originals into a Word document and delete/cut/paste/edit the sentences.  I’ve found these to be most useful when I pair students to recast the sentences in class because they negotiate and talk to each other about the reconstructions and, by listening in, I get a better feel for what they know and don’t know and can intervene at the point of confusion rather than after the exercise is completed.  This page has A LOT of other related grammar material that it links to as well.

Study Skills: The Learning Toolbox. Eng. 109, 107, and Dev. reading teachers, you will love this fabulous learning skills site developed at JMU. I encourage everyone to check out the material at this site, though, because incorporating more learning-to-learn and study skills strategies into the content of all of our developmental courses is a specific objective that came out of the VCCS Developmental Task Force Report that was published in the Fall.  Besides, it’s fun and easy material to teach, is necessary for our developmental populations, and it can be a lot more interesting material for students to write about than their ideal vacation or some argument topic they know nothing about anyway.

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