History paragraph, DS10, K12HO

[Capt_Uhura]

Today, my DS10 edited a paragraph for K12 Human Odyssey teacher/student pages. He was guided in writing an outline to answer the question on how Sumer fulfilled the requirements for a civilization. Then he was to use that outline to write a paragraph.

 

Darn it, I just realized we no longer have the first draft. :001_huh:

 

here is the final.

 

 

Sumer meets all three requirements for being a civilization. The first requirement is a surplus of food. The Sumerians had good soil in which to grow crops, canals to transport water, and livestock to plow their fields. Another requirement is a division of labor. This leads to the ability to have specialists because not every one has to farm. Sumerian specialties included potters, carpenters, and weavers. Then cities, the third requirement, can be built. People can live closer together to share their specialities. This allowed Sumerians to complete large construction projects like large walls to keep out invaders, granaries to store food and temples to worship gods. The Sumerians were the first civilization because they met all three requirements for being a civilization.

 

 

He typed this in so was able to use spell check. Here is some of our dialogue.

 

Mom: Ok, let's read your topic sentence. What key word do you think needs to be repeated to give cohesion to your paragraph?

Son: requirement.

Mom: In the surplus of food requirement, you state how Sumer fulfilled that requirement. Should you do the same for the others to maintain parallelism?

 

He felt his closing was boring b/c it merely repeated his topic sentence but he was ready to be done with it and wanted to leave it as it is. I was fine with that as I don't feel the need to make every writing piece perfect but would rather move on to fresh material. We discussed how this could easily be expanded and turned into an essay with each requirement being it's own paragraph.

 

I can see that writing is going to take up time and that it really is a process involving lots of discussion. I also I think the way to go for me has been to gather writing resources so that I'm able to guide him on the fly using content areas rather than a separate writing program.

 

I'm posting this just as an example but if someone wants to comment, I'm all :bigear:. I would use the comments to address future paragraphs as we won't be editing this one any further.

 

Capt Uhura

Edited April 22, 2011 by Capt_Uhura

[JenniferB]

I think it's excellent, and so are the improvement steps you went through.

[Capt_Uhura]

Thanks Jennifer! I hope others will post similarly. I"m finding that I don't lack for writing curricula:001_huh:. What I lack is the dialogue necessary to utilize that curricula, that knowledge. If you read Julie Bogart's TWJ, much of teaching writing is in that dialogue which can't really be scripted. What I need is examples!

[Kuovonne]

This paragraph is organized effectively and free from mechanical errors. The sentences connect smoothly and the parallelism in the lists is well crafted. Overall, this is a paragraph to be proud of and the dialog with your son when revising sounds great.

 

It's fabulous that you son recognized that his closing was boring for merely repeating the topic sentence. It's also fine that he didn't feel like revising it this time, especially given the effort he already put into revising this paragraph.

 

My main quibble is that the topic sentence doesn't feel right to me. Since the paragraph starts with the name of a civilization, it seems strange to say that a civilization meets the requirements for being a civilization. I know you don't plan to revise this paragraph anymore, but here is food for thought. What if you opened the paragraph with something like "In <time/place> living conditions met the three requirements for a civilization to form." Then close with something like "The result was the first civilization, the Sumerians."

[Capt_Uhura]

I totally agree Kuovonne. That stemmed from the K12HO assignment which stated "How did Sumer met the criteria to be considered a civilization?". I think it's too abrupt. But while we won't technically revise it again, we'll discuss it and I'll just copy it and edit as you suggested so he can see the difference w/out making him suffer through coming up with something on his own. Then next week when we do the next one, we'll focus on a strong opening!

 

Thank you so much!

 

Capt Uhura