ELA

Students learn that writing is a process that involves at least four steps; prewriting, drafting, revising and editing. They understand that the writing process helps them write clear, thoughtful pieces that communicate their ideas to others in a clear and concise manner.

Using good punctuation helps us write clearly, makes our writing easier to read, and helps our readers understand what we mean. Exciting graphics and video footage combine with the rules of punctuation as students learn about period usage, the exclamation point, question marks, commas, the apostrophe, quotation marks, the colon, semicolon, and parentheses.

Students understand that learning the eight parts of speech helps people to know the function of words, and how they are joined together to make coherent sentences. They will be introduced to the noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection. They will also realize that depending on its use the same word can represent a different part of speech.

'People, places and things' emerge as our young editors' theme for the next issue of their literary magazine, launching them on a mission to identify and learn all about nouns. In Nouns, young viewers will enjoy following along with the Wordswork team as they discover that nouns can be common or proper, singular or plural.

The Wordswork staff decides on an action theme as they prepare the latest issue of their literary magazine, and that can mean only one special group of words: verbs.

The Wordswork staff is on a quest to fill their magazine with those groups of words we all know and love: sentences. Their job sounds simple enough, but little do they know that a sentence isn't just any old group of words. To be considered a sentence, those words must convey a complete thought and contain both a subject and a predicate.

The Wordswork staff is on a mission to tackle those tiny symbols that help make our writing more clear: punctuation! The team digs through the writing samples submitted to their literary magazine to uncover the rules of punctuation.

Choosing stories for the next issue of their magazine, the Wordswork staff decides to focus on words that tell us more about other words.

Using both the free Web and the invisible Web, students will learn how to focus, strategize, refine and evaluate their research throughout the search process.