Managing Menacing Essays

As their brainpower expands, children are asked to exercise it with writing essays in school. Teachers are asked to teach them how. Well, the rules have changed since many of us went to school and many of us at Carmel Middle School in Carmel, California felt like we needed to lay out the rules of the game really clearly for ourselves and our students. Thus the project was born.

We researched, we brainstormed and finally we wrote The Sixth Grade Writing Handbook. We wanted to explain the mysteries of writing in general, to answer the illusive questions about punctuation and grammar, and to give structure to those who needed it for the five major types of essays required by the state of California. If any of these collected tidbits can be of help to any of you, my over-worked colleagues, I humbly offer our website link on behalf of my team.

Go to www.CarmelMiddle.org then to Classroom Pages, then to 6th Grade Core, and there is our final product The Sixth Grade Writing Handbook. It is accessed via the Table of Contents and each section has pages which can be downloaded one at a time. It is free to use and hopefully valuable to all you active brains wishing to expand with the exercise of meeting essay requirements. Let me know if it helps, and if you have any suggestions for improving it on its next printing. Cut and paste the following URL into your browser (: www.carmelmiddle.org/core/handbook/Contents.pdf)

None of us is as smart as all of us! Write on!

Shelly Glennon (A.K.A. Lyon)

Managing Menacing Essays

By Shelly Lyon