Writing activities for JHS

Junior High School students are commonly tested on writing in a number of ways:

• Sentence scrambling
• Free writing (writing about a theme)
• Translation
• Dictation

Sentence scrambling

This is simply putting a sentence back in the correct order.

Tokyo. / in / named / photo / a / I / collection / "Alaska" / bought

...becomes...

I bought a photo collection named "Alaska" in Tokyo.

altastic has a very useful tool for scrambling sentences to save you a bit of time: "The Scramblinator".

Free writing

Given a theme, students should be able to write about three sentences.

Dictation

Students write what is being read.

Dictation Quiz

Note, the following is from the Gunma mid-year seminar 2010.

Establish a routine of listening and writing practice.

1. Choose an excerpt from the textbook that your students have studied (max, 5 sentences).
2. Students write as you dictate on a piece of paper to be handed in at the end.
3. Read each sentence three times (at normal, slow and normal speed). Students listen the first time, write the second and correct the last time.
4. Collect the quizzes and make notes of common mistakes.

As a follow up, create another five sentences using the same common mistakes found in the quizzes. Each sentence should have 2 mistakes for the students to find and correct.

Translation

Translation in both directions is common.

Activities

• Bingo

Fonts to learn to write

When making material for students learning to write, the correct font is important. Most of the popular fonts are not suitable. For example, the small 'a' (and sometimes the small 'g') in most fonts is displayed different to how it is written by hand. Century Gothic is a font that is a nice font for learners and is available on Windows by default. New Horizon uses a font similar to Century Gothic for the first half of their first year book, then reverts to a more common font.

Fonts for students to trace and font with ruled lines can be found on sites such as fontspace and others.

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