Unit 8 ESL: Pulling it All Together and Preparing for More

It's the end of the academic year and we have made it through the entire Great Writing 1 textbook, having ordered it late. I am very proud that we muscled through it. I believe the students' writing has improved the past two years I taught these kids and they are now prepared for their writing class next year with a different teacher.

Our previous lesson, Unit 7 was our most difficult with writing complex sentences using adjective clauses. One of my co-teachers told me they don't learn that until 9th grade. The hardest part of teaching them is weaning them off of relying on writing everything with simple sentences. I have to require using at least one compound and one complex sentence. I told them good English has variety, not repetition. That's very hard to reinforce when they read so little English. I think writing has to be reinforced by reading literature and they just don't have the time the way their curriculum and education system is organized.

May/June 2019

WEEK 1 Reviewing Parts of a Paragraph
Class 1: pg. 208-211
Class 2 pg. 212-214

WEEK 2 Combining Sentences with a Connector
Class 1: pg. 215-218
Class 2: pg.219-221

WEEK 3 Peer Editing
Class 1: pg. 222-224a
Class 2 pg. 224b-226

WEEK 4 Original Student Writing
Class 1: pg. 227 (Activity 22)
Class 2: pg. 227 (Activity 23)

The ppt is a work in progress at the moment: