As the academic year begins to wind down and you begin to reach the end of your writing curriculum, you may be considering ways you can keep your students’ skills strong over the summer. Perhaps you are an experienced Structure and Style teacher who is teaching students using source texts you’ve gathered. You may even be offering a current events class and want to incorporate writing with Structure and Style. We have some suggestions for you! Within this blog we have provided a number of different source texts that you can use with your students, and a special gift from WORLD Magazine†.
Published in November 2020, the blog post “Additional Source Material to Teach Structure and Style” provides several links to source texts that you can use to craft your own writing assignments. After that post was published, we added a few more writing lesson suggestions as well:
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“A Haiku for the Holidays”: While writing a haiku doesn’t specifically fit within the nine units, it can be a lot of fun to take a day or two to play around with this simple poetic structure. This blog post that celebrates Thanksgiving is equally applicable to Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Flag Day, or any holiday that strikes your fancy.
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“A Christmas Story for the Senses: Dylan Thomas’ ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’”: This writing assignment for older, experienced Structure and Style students invites students to play around with advanced stylistic techniques such as alliteration, simile and metaphor, and teeter totters.
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“The Edifying Flame of Candlelight: A Unit 4 Opportunity”: This writing opportunity sharpens those Unit 4 report-style skills.
Today we are particularly excited to pass along a new resource many teachers enjoy using within their classrooms. WORLD Magazine, which publishes four separate magazines, all written for different age levels, features engaging articles on a wide variety of subjects including science, history, current events, and more. These articles provide excellent fodder for teachers to use as source texts for several of IEW’s units. Pull a brief article to give your students practice in outlining from source texts using Units 1 and 2. Select a slightly longer one to give your students opportunities to practice their “some-a-rizing” skills in Unit 4. Select a compelling image or series of images to practice Unit 5. Or have a subscription on hand to supply students with research for Unit 8 essays.
WORLD Magazine has generously offered a free, three-month subscription for IEW’s customers. The subscription includes six print issues as well as full online access to the magazine’s articles and site content.
In addition to WORLD Magazine, the company publishes other periodicals for younger readers. You can check them out at the links below. Each of these links also provides a PDF sample magazine that you can review. Many teachers use these magazines to pull source texts for their writing assignments:
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God’s Big WORLD† (for beginning readers)
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WORLDkids† (for children ages 7‒10)
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WORLDteen† (for preteens and young teenagers 11‒14)
† Contains distinctly Christian content
