My first love is for math, however, I have found out how exciting teaching language arts can be over the past three years. My confidence level for teaching language arts started increasing after attending several workshops presented by Phyllis Hostmeyer. This page includes evidence of completion forms for the two Hostmeyer workshops I attended, as well as some of her ideas that I have tried in my classroom this year. These include the narrative hand model, event planning sheet for the narrative, and the examples used to improve my students' introductions and conclusions. I am also including a picture of a bulletin board I used this year to reinforce these openings and closings. With the implementation of some of Hostmeyer's ideas, as well as, my increased confidence level in teaching language arts, I have seen tremendous improvements in my students' writing the last two years.
Hostmeyer Workshops
The ideas of Phyllis Hostmeyer have greatly enhanced my Language Arts curriculum this year. I attended two of her workshops and have already incorporated many ideas into my classroom. Following are the evidence of completion forms that I received from these workshops.
Narrative Activities
During first quarter all seventh graders are asked to write a narrative essay. I incorporated the hand model and the event planning sheets from Mrs. Hostmeyer to help my students. Great stories with excellent details resulted from these activities. I am including the hand model as well as the first narrative paragraphs a couple of my students wrote after using that model. I am also including the event planning sheet to show how it helped organize their narratives into chronological order and add secondary support.
Event Planning Sheet
Openings and Closings
I used the following examples to introduce three different types of openings and closings that students could use in their own writing. I showed the tree essay first with the weak opening and closing. Then we discussed what alliteration, onomatopoeia, and bold statement were and showed the three different examples. Later we discussed using reminder statements, quotations, and predictions to improve our closings.
