Basic Middle School Mechanics - Reinforce Writing Fundamentals

This eight-week course focuses on "boosting the basics"; reinforcing writing fundamentals such as:

Basic Mechanics allows students to strengthen their foundation writing skills. The course teaches the basic building block of writing: the parts of a sentence and the different types of sentences.

How do I know which course to choose?

First, you'll want to zero in on the appropriate grade range. Knowing that our international visitors may be using a different naming system for the grade levels, we'll lay them out for you below.

3rd-5th grade students (7-10yr olds) will generally use elementary courses.
6th-8th grade students(11-13 yrs olds) will generally use middle school courses
9th-12th grade students (14-19 yr olds) will generally use high school courses.

Next you'll want to decide on what you hope to get from the course.

Students needing help with sentence structure and sentence mechanics will want to use:

ES: Sensational Sentences (elementary)
MS: Basic Mechanics (middle)

Students interested in gaining skills in paragraph writing will want to use:

ES2: Perfect Paragraphs (elementary)
MS1: Powerful Paragraphs (middle)

Students looking to better their essay writing skills can choose from:

ES1: Intro to Essay Writing (elementary)
MS2: Welcome to the Essay (middle)
HS1: Essay Writing (high)

Students with interest in writing for specific uses can choose from:

MS3: Writing Today (middle)
HS2: Writing for Standardized Tests (high)
HS3: Writing for Research Papers(high)

Course Objectives by week (units):

Complete Sentences and Noun Sense – Unit 1 Students learn the difference between a complete sentence and a fragment, will practice differentiating complete from incomplete sentences, and will write complete thoughts (sentences). Students also identify nouns and identify their plural and possessive forms.

Subjects and Predicates – Unit 2 Students identify the noun phrase and the verb phrase of a sentence.

Statements and Questions – Unit 3 Students learn to write and punctuate two types of sentences: statements and questions.

Commands and Exclamations – Unit 4 Students learn to write and punctuate commands and exclamations.

Subject – Verb Agreement – Unit 5 Students identify the correct form of a verb to agree with the given subject and uses them in sentences.

Subject – Verb Agreement Special Cases – Unit 6 Students identify the correct form of the verb to use with more difficult subjects such as pronouns you, anyone, and all. They also write sentences using these correct verb forms.

Capitalization – Unit 7 Students learn and use rules for capitalizing words alone and within complete sentences.

Confusing Words – Unit 8 Students learn about words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different definitions. They identify them and use them in writing complete sentences. They also review all the skills taught in the course by correcting poorly written sentences.