Seth…

We’re practicing key word outlining in Language.  I want my boys to have it down pat so we’re thinking of fun topics (from our brains) to key word outline.  The day before yesterday we did 1. toothbrushes and 2. poop, separately NOT together because that would be…..well…..gross.

Today we picked another favorite topic and Monday we will write our paper about this topic.  I want this to be a surprise to one of my readers so here are the photos:

Our TOPIC and our brainstorming:

We decided to combine two of our ideas and crossed off the one they were least interested in writing about so here is our key word outlining for our first paragraph:

Second paragraph:  pictures are free and do not count in our 3 word maximum so we use them quite a bit in our outlines of course the arrow means up!

Third paragraph:  Four words are allowed occasionally as you may have noticed in our first paragraph.

Here is our entire white board:

And here is Son #1 copying it onto a piece of notebook paper in preparation for writing.

For those of you who are not familiar with key word outlining it is the process of picking out three important or interesting facts and using those facts to make a paragraph.  We normally keyword outline from a source text but my boys think picking information about a topic from our brains is more fun so we’re practicing it this way for now.

We then write a rough draft, add dress-ups (-ly words, strong verbs, quality adjectives, prepositional openers, -ing openers, VSS (very short sentences)) to make our papers interesting.

We then write a final draft with a introductory and conclusion paragraph.  The introductory paragraph introduces you to the paper and the conclusion tells you the best thing about the topic we are writing about.  Sound hard?  It’s really not!  This outline (because the boys love it)  took about 10 minutes.  My youngest son and daughter were even involved in the process.

When we finish out papers we will deliver them to “the topic”.

What are you doing in school today?