"Daily Oral Language"

Recently, I was accepted for a job in San Francisco. It's with this small organization in China Town called "Best Education." The director is leaving the arrangement of the curriculum up to me. I'll have 12 students a day, 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, from June 4th to June 29th, and from July 9th to August 3rd. My students will consist of 3rd and 4th graders.

The good thing about this job is that he's setting a specific enough objective for me to achieve in 3 weeks. He wants me to teach the students how to write a good paragraph. I'll need to incorporate a grammar & punctuation component, reading, writing, and I guess vocabulary to some degree.

I met up with Mr. Agajan to give me some ideas on components I can include in my little 3 week writing program. He referred me to a program called "Daily Oral Language Plus." It has a collection of sentences. One set of sentences has some error with it. It could be grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and you get the idea.

Here's an example: "Mr West read me and Zach a book called Quillworker." That's the incorrect sentence. Here's the corrected sentence: "Mr. West read Zach and me a book called Quillworker."

This is how I would predict that I would use this. Everyday, as soon as the school day begins, I would write a sentence on the whiteboard. All students would take a pencil and paper and try to fix the sentence. The error of the sentence would be based on, for example, a grammatical concept that was learned the day prior. And, that would serve as a short review of that concept. That's how I think I would use it.

I still have a lot of planning to do. I hope I run this writing program well.