English

Get ready for “toad-al” fun with Bill Nye and the “Amphibians” episode. Frogs, toads, salamanders, newts, and caecilians (worm-like animals that have backbones) are all amphibians, animals that spend part of their lives in water and part on land. Amphibians are slimy. Amphibians are cold-blooded that means their body temperature changes with the temperature outside.

Learning about science can be hard work, but simple machines can make it easier. Let Bill Nye push and pull you around ramps, levers, screws, and pulleys.

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.

From fiction to nonfiction, short stories to poems to memoirs, creative and narrative writing often stem from writers' imaginations or personal interests, weaving together believable characters, settings, and plots.

Presents the basics of expository writing, from composing the introduction and the thesis statement to assembling body paragraphs to writing an effective conclusion.

Writers, ranging from a sportswriter for a school newspaper to a student working on a research project, demonstrate the processes of developing a focused thesis statement as well as structuring and writing solid introductory, supporting and concluding paragraphs.

This program suggests strategies to help discern the appropriate tone for a piece of writing based on purpose and audience. Student writers, ranging from an avid cyclist on a fundraising campaign for an upcoming school trip to a writer communicating with her fellow club members on the Internet, use formal and informal writing to accomplish their task.

In this program, a young writer must compose a convincing letter to the school news paper to win his classmates' votes for student council, while another writer is challenged to research and write a supporting argument in favor of an issue that she feels strongly against.