Beginners' Book in Language. A Book for the Third Grade

66. Making a Little Book

Reading edition

Now you and your classmates are ready to make a book about wild animals. Every page of the book should contain a short but interesting account of some wild animal. A cover of stiff paper might have these words written or printed on it:

Illustration from Beginners' Book in Language. A Book for the Third Grade

Written Exercise. Write your page[78] for the class book about wild animals. Better write it twice. After the first, rather rapid writing is finished, read it over several times and try to make it better. Try to put better words in the places of some of those you used. Try to add a bright sentence or two. Leave out sentences and words that are not needed. Copy what you then have.

Group Exercise. Before each pupil's account is put in the book, that account should be read by the class to make sure that there are no mistakes in it. The class might be divided into a number of groups of five or six pupils each. Each group could then correct its five or six accounts. The pupils of each group would work together, correcting one account at a time.[79] In this work of finding mistakes the following questions[80] will be useful:

1. Does every sentence in the account begin with a capital letter?

2. Does every sentence end with a period or question mark?

3. Is every word correctly spelled?

4. Are there any mistakes in English?

Notes in this chapter

Note 1 · Note 78 (page 163). For the sake of difference from the preceding oral work it may be desirable to let each animal tell its own story in the Note 2 · Note 79 (page 163). While this correction work is apparently entirely in the hands of the pupils, the teacher should make the most of the si Note 3 · Note 80 (page 163). Only one question should be considered at one critical reading.