When I was a new teacher, I thought library day looked like an easy day. Silly me. I enjoy our time, but several class visits in a row can make for a hectic day! But I have learned one good way to make the visits a little calmer: I give students writing skills worksheets to do when they are not looking for books. There never seems to be enough time to work on writing, so I grab every opportunity I can. One of my absolute favorite sources is the Cottonwood Press. Not only does it have several excellent books that target writing skills, there is usually a delightful sense of humor involved in the lessons, which I believe makes them a bit more palatable to young people.
On the grammar front, we continue with helping verbs and verb phrases. Today I upped the ante a bit with somewhat more challenging work. Fortunately, students seemed to quickly grasp what they needed to be paying attention to, so after a few initial errors, things progressed nicely. And, it was a great opportunity to talk a little more about adverbs, common interrupters in verb phrases, but a difficult part of speech for students to identify and fully understand.
GW
