Harper Lee published her first novel in 1960, at the age of thirty-four. It won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction the following year. “To Kill a Mockingbird” tells two stories at once: one about attorney Atticus Finch’s defense of a …[Continue]
Language Arts, Reference Resources
This category is further divided into: Grammar, Jokes and Riddles, Poetry, Reading, Reference, Vocabulary, Writing.
Margaret Wise Brown
Although “Goodnight Moon” is her best known work (it has sold forty-eight million copies since 1947), children’s author Margaret Wise Brown (1910 – 1952) wrote more than a hundred children’s books before dying suddenly at forty-two while recovering from surgery. …[Continue]
Driver’s Ed
When calculated on a per-mile basis, teens are four times more likely to crash than older drivers. Worse yet, car accidents are the leading cause of death for American teens. On a more positive note, many organizations have created free …[Continue]
Diagramming Sentences
Sentence diagramming (also known as Reed-Kellogg diagramming) was a popular classroom grammar technique for nearly a century. It lost favor about thirty years ago, but several Surfnetkids readers recently suggested sentence diagramming as a topic. I hope this means grammar …[Continue]
Rebus Stories
A rebus uses pictures or symbols to represent words or parts of words. Think of them as emoji for preschoolers! Some rebus are brainteasers (such as the puzzles at Fun-with-Words.com), but today’s pick of rebus story sites are for emergent …[Continue]
How to Write an Essay
Essay writing is an essential skill you will need all your life, not only in school. This week’s picks are for students from grade six through college, and cover not only report writing, but also answering essay questions….[Continue]
Forms of Poetry
Poetic form refers to rules followed by different types of poems. The rules may describe the rhythm of the poem, the length of a poem, its rhyming scheme, the use of alliteration, or the poem’s shape on a page. Don’t …[Continue]
Wizard of Oz
Frank L. Baum (1856 – 1910) wrote fourteen children’s books and a handful of short stories about the mythical land of Oz, but it was his first,”The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, that became an American classic and one of the …[Continue]
Riddles
What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries? What can you catch but not throw? What goes around the world but stays in a corner? No sooner spoken than broken. What is it? * If you enjoy a challenge …[Continue]
Grammar
My 1979 edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style reigns over my workspace from its place of honor on my bookshelf. It’s a slim volume because, like all good writing, the needless words have been omitted. The original, …[Continue]
