Happy Highlighting!

Today we tried something new with our sentence diagramming. We took our past S.E.W. (Stop Everything and Write) papers and decided to decorate them with some color. We first started with nouns. The students were instructed to find all of the nouns they wrote in their story - Proper Nouns, and all types of Common Nouns- Persons, Places, Things and Ideas. Once they finished with nouns, we moved on to Verbs! We broke out the blue and first started with Action Verbs. After finishing that we reviewed Linking and Helping Verbs and colored those blue as well. Finally, we opened up our Yellows and searched for Adjectives. The students seemed to get a kick out of doing it and it was a nice variation to our daily grind. The nice revelation I saw with the students (hopefully it sticks) was that some of them realized their papers were in fact not very colorful....which poses a structural problem. We discussed and agreed that we "knew" Subjects were Nouns and Predicates were Verbs. We then talked about how we "knew" that in order to have complete sentences you had to have a Subject and a Predicate.....thus meaning each sentence needed a Noun and a Verb. So it opened some eyes to some when they did not see a red and blue pattern on their papers. Most of the papers I saw were a sea of red. Our final connection was that if we were truly using Elaborative Detail in our papers then there would have been a lot more yellow- which was the least seen color. All in all I think it was a great way to put things into perspective and remind the students that it is not just about "knowing" the information, you have to apply it all in your writing! Below are two great examples of what I was hoping to see out of today's lesson.