First day of school 2012-2013

Let's see if I can attain my goal this year and start posting about my school year from Day 1. I discussed what we would be covering this year in language arts, including the importance of grammar. We wrote, and I followed through on my decision last year to strongly discourage illegible handwriting and put some teeth into that concept. I don't require cursive. Sadly, I let that go years ago. It wasn't worth the battle. I'm talking about basic printing. It has to be legible, the letters have to be formed and placed properly, and the improper use of capitals and lower case letters will result in having to correct the errors. In addition to handwriting, I emphasized margins all the way around and the proper way to indent. Each year I am surprised at how few students understand a "floating" right margin and think it's acceptable to write to the edge of the paper, as well to the very bottom of the page. As part of the discussion about the righthand margin I included hyphenating a word to move some of it to the next line if necessary. Virtually no one had any idea what the guidelines are, which is why I see attempts to hyphenate one-syllable words, random breaks at places other than a syllable, and a single letter followed a hyphen rather than moving the entire word to the next line. I am also surprised at the diverse methods students use to determine indentation, and that many young people believe "tab" on the keyboard is all they need to know. Of course, they have no idea what tab represents. I explained that indentation, or tab, represents five spaces, or perhaps easier for them to remember, a five-letter word. My goodness, it makes me feel like a dinosaur when I recall taking typing in high school and learning how to set tabs and what they represented. I also remember how happy we were that we had electric typewriters! The very cutting edge of technology! How times have changed. I am very tired, but happy about a good first day. I look forward to tomorrow when I establish what our five foundation skills are for understanding grammar.