MadWords Now

It is true.

Without the Hayes PTO, the staff and students who work together here would be short of one of our most valued resources.  The PTO provides moral, financial, and organizational support that would be sorely missed.

If your parents are interested in supporting the PTO, have them download one of the participation forms here:

PTO Involvement form (.pdf)

PTO Involvement form (.doc)

I agree with Mr. Wright who writes:

The PTO and other student organizations will be needing assistance from parents throughout the year. A form was sent home recently with a form to fill out if you are willing to help during the year. If you did not receive that but might be able to help during the year, please download it from the file section to the right and send it in.

So, your short story is in the writing stage (remember, People Wear Really Exciting Pants), and you are working on your Ed Raises Cows From Rwanda (the five parts of a plot, namely: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution).

You already know that the due date for your first, typed draft is this Friday, May 9, and now you are drained from all of that imagination-mania!

Bearing that in mind, I have a few links for web sites that I discovered on another sixth grade blog, The Electronic Pencil, that you may find interesting–even fun! Check some out, let me know what you experience there.

Build Your Wild Self

Magnetic Poetry

Lego Avatar Creator

Create a Band

Jam Studio

Tags: ela, middle school blog, middle school writing, sixth grade, writing

Well, I can dream, can’t I? If I am writing a short story, then by gosh I will create my own magical–and with Tabasco, wonderful–world! That is the power of being the author! The world you write about in your story is created completely by your imagination! What power!Your short story will be yours as well! Of course, the goal is to share it with your reader, otherwise the world doesn’t get to visit the amusement park of your incredible imagination! You wouldn’t do that to your readers now, would you?

Over the next couple of weeks, you will begin putting the pieces of your very own short story together. Your universe will slowly form, until, Wham! a short story is born! You will be asking repeatedly to read yours to the class! To share your amazing ideas and twists and turns of your story. To have readers say, “Wow! That’s a really good story. How did you ever come up with that?” You’ll smile, thank that person, and say, “I don’t know, it just sort of grew out of my head!”

So, fasten your seat belt! Get ready to free your imagination! Prepare to amaze yourself and others!

Prepare to be proud.

Short story podcast lurks below.

041608.mp3

Slushy greetings, one and all! Yikes! What a messy world we live in–weather, that is.

So, this week your biographies will be returned so that you can take them home and make some revisions, changes (Writing Process, Step 2). The next step will be creating a second draft to read to someone at home aloud, out loud, perform. Then, as you catch mistakes, or hear pieces of your paper that just don’t come out sounding very smooth, you will make notes on the paper. Some writers do this with colors: markers, highlighters, sticky squares, crayons, etc. The draft comes into MadWords, I check it in, give it back, and you type up your third draft to bring in to class. I will go over this checking on spelling, mechanics, grammar just like we do during Caught’ya! (Third step of writing process–editing.) The draft comes back to you, and you create your final, perfect draft, suitable for holiday gift-giving! (Final step of writing process–publishing!)

Most seriously, people, you should truly think about reading your paper to the person you have written about. This is a big deal to a lot of folks, especially parents or grandparents or siblings! Very heartfelt, very powerful. Doesn’t happen many times in life, so take advantage of the moment!

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I think that this post is setting a record for the most exclamation points used! Hooray! I wonder where the exclamation point came from, anyway? I will have to hope for some amazing person to look this up and tell us.

All right, enough about punctuation. Time to go and salt the walk, then drive, ECK! to the store, and get some sourdough bread for dinner. No, sillies, we are not having just bread, we are having pesto sauce with shrimp over some Angel Hair pasta, big yum!

See you in MadWords.