homeschool

First Paragraph

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We’ve just started the next book in The Boy’s language arts cirriculum, “Paragraph Town”. The goal of the book it to take what they’ve learned in grammar and making beautiful, efficient, poetic sentences and start stringing them together into beautiful paragraphs.

The assignment for Lesson Three was to write a 5-10 sentence paragraph describing something and the point of the exercise was to think about what order you want to write in. What goes first? What goes last? Honestly, it’s hard enough just to get him to put any words down on paper, so I think this might take longer than expected.

I gave him things to think about and he wrote his first draft:

yelo
stone smeld like sulfer and hot dogs. the cheesburgurs are good thare,i
rele like the guysers thare, the mountns are hi and the vallys are
low.

I read it out loud and suddenly he started just gushing with beautiful, interesting sentences…. but out loud. So I quickly wrote them down and asked him questions, which lead to more:

Yellowstone smelled like sulfur and hot dogs.
There
are geothermal pools of water that have different elements in them like
iron, and such. One had an airflow in it that made it bubble. It was
red and green and stuff.
Dragon’s
mouth really smelled like sulfur. It didn’t look like anything at
first, but then it blew out a giant wave of steam that just eck. Just
smelled really bad. It smelled like creepers.
And it had a pool of water it was like a cave with a lake inside.
The cheeseburgers are juicy and cheesy and good.
The mountains are 11,000 feet, which means an airplane could crash into them, they are so high!
The geysers explode with boiling hot water.  
The tallest geyser I could see from half a mile away, it was super tall.
The buffalo are hairy and live in herds.

We’ll wait for another day to revise this. We don’t have a coherent paragraph yet, but we have some very amazing ideas and images to work with.

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