Fun and Games

One thing I have been trying to do this semester is to introduce my students to rhetorical devices, and to improve their sentence structure. Along these lines, we've been doing some writing exercises and some language arts games/activities. Some of the more successful ones have been:

Varying sentence structure: I had them all write as many three-four word sentences as they could in 3 minutes. They then read them aloud, and we all agreed that they sounded very stilted. They spent another three minutes writing the longest run-on possible, then shared that. We ended up agreeing that sentences need to be in between the two extremes, and writing them in a variety of ways/lengths sounds best when read out loud.

Apostrophe (borrowed from another TA): I told them about apostrophe as a rhetoric device (not the punctuation)., gave them examples, and then had them write and share their own.

Collaborative Writing: I asked each student to take out a sheet of paper, and start a story. We then passed the paper to the right, and the next person continued the story, passed it to the right again, and so on. The stories, when read out loud, resulted in gales of laughter!

Irony: I explained irony, and gave examples. They wrote their own ironic sentences and shared them with the class.

We have also worked on:

• Comma splices
• Run-on and fragmented sentences
• Coordinative conjunctions
• Hyperbole and understatement

Working in Groups

I recently assigned my first group project to my students. I split up the reading, "Preface and the New Civil Rights", by Ken Yoshino, into four sections, then broke the class into groups of four as follows:

Group 1: Shayna, Luis, Elly, Stephanie P. Please read "Preface"
Group 2: Moira, Brenda, Gio, Samantha N. Please read from page 541 ("The New Civil Rights") to 543 (end with "...'brothers' of other nations")

Group 3: A.J., Natasha, Elida, Alyssa. Please read from 543 ("The universal rights...") to 545 ("...not my healthiest impulse")

Group 4: Hanna, Mikayla, Stephanie G., Samantha C. Please read 545 ("Law is also an incomplete...") to the end.

I assigned this project as follows:
____________________________________________________________________________
I have split this reading up into four sections. The groups listed below are assigned the sections as follows. Each group will be responsible for defining unfamiliar words, summarizing key points, and sharing quotes they find really reflect the author's purpose/writing. Each group will share these ideas in class on Tuesday, after some time working together. I am setting up a Moodle forum for each group -- please contribute BY MONDAY AFTERNOON as this will really help with the in-class work.

And then later in the week...
Continue your Moodle forum discussions over the next couple of days, so that you are prepared, as a group, to share your section of the reading on Tuesday, 9/27/16. Each group will be given about 10 minutes to present their section.
____________________________________________________________________________

Discussion in the Moodle forums I set up was... okay. They all posted, but there wasn't quite the give-and-take with responses I was hoping for. I did give them some further advice as well as part of their continuing in-class and Moodle discussions:
____________________________________________________________________________
Each group will be given about 10 minutes to present their section. Consider the following as you work:

1. What roles do you want everyone to take on in sharing with the class? Do you want to split the load between paragraphs, ideas, or have some people handle ideas, others vocabulary, etc.? How do you want to share the information you've read?

2. What are the main ideas in your section?
3. Is there any unfamiliar vocabulary, or unusual terminology?
____________________________________________________________________________

Finally, we got to presentation day, and again it went... okay. Each group did meet the basic criteria of the assignment, but there wasn't a lot of expansion.

I think for future assignments, I need to be more directive.