Alien with halo icon, AnnaS?
The first quiz contains examples of errors that are commonly found among high school writers with usage/mechanics problems. My first year with ninth graders, I erroneously believed that showing the class a few examples of a given error would cause the error to disappear. Wrong. By going through many exercises built around an error, following up with a test, and one other very good method, such errors are weeded out one by one.
Here's the very good method that a colleague suggested although she admits she hasn't tried it yet [so much to do; so little time]:
When students make journal entries each day, require that a specified type of standard usage appear somewhere in that writing twice. For example, if the journal entry focused on the sounds in the night after everyone's gone to sleep, the requirement could be:
Use the past tense of 'to lie' (recline) twice in your journal entry. Example, 'As I lay under the warmth of my covers, my cat began to yowl.'
I have the kids circle the two places where they've written the requirement for the day. My colleague's suggestion is a very good one, I think, because it provides me with an opportunity for a little lesson before journal writing, and it causes the kids to apply a standard into thinking and writing about their own lives. Because we write each day in journals (or free writing), this activity affords me with still another way to reinforce grammar lessons.
Hey, Jackie! When my kids go the computer lab week after next, I'll have them try the quiz. The online quizzes offer still another way of teaching grammar, and my students have taken such online, self-check exercises this year for correction of comma splice and fused sentence exercises. The quiz you provided will be a quick check of some usage principles we've covered this year.
The penultimate link on my page starter has a very good set of exercises on sentence punctuation that didn't cause any moans and groans:
http://www.schoolnotes.com/23831/elder5.html
