Kerri Miller 
Schools are closing across the U.S. in an attempt to stem the tide of coronavirus infections. ELA Academy is a good source of free instructional videos for English language arts.
In this series, ELA Academy interviews several published authors to get some tips for aspiring writers trying to get into the writerly mode and finish writing projects. Holly Jennings, author of Arena and Gauntlet and winner of the American Library Association’s 2017 Alex Award, spoke to me via video chat from her home in Canada. … Read more
This page is intended to help high school English teachers (especially Pre-AP and AP Lang) and homeschooling parents who are trying to wrap their minds around how to teach rhetoric and rhetorical analysis.
This page lists resources I think will help teachers and homeschooling parents wrap their minds around learning expectations. It can be overwhelming to begin designing a curriculum from scratch because there are so many things that CAN be taught, but time is limited. That’s why I agree with the advice to begin with the end in mind. … Read more
Have a bonus video – artistic fragments! I really intended for the sentence types video to be the last in this series for a while, but when the section on sentence fragments took on a life of its own, I decided to make a separate video. I hope you like my celebration of breaking the … Read more
Check out my new video on the four main sentence types: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4-C38hxF2o In this video, I go over simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, including examples from literature. Students have a chance to pause the video, identify the various clauses and how they’re joined, and hit play again to check their answers. Don’t miss the … Read more
Last time we learned about the parts of a clause; here are the clause TYPES: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJUy9lvZiEo LINKS Independent and dependent clauses, with practice (The Tongue Untied): http://www.grammaruntied.com/blog/?cat=49 Clauses: The Essential Building-Blocks (Capital Community College): http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/clauses.htm Types of clauses (LearningNerd): http://learningnerd.com/2006/09/08/english-grammar-types-of-clauses/ Complex sentences (Adrienne Mitchell): http://media.lanecc.edu/users/mitchella/WR080_online/softchalk_practices/complex_sentences/ Relative clauses (RMIT University): https://www.dlsweb.rmit.edu.au/lsu/content/4_WritingSkills/writing_tuts/sentences_LL/relative.html Relative clauses, including info on … Read more
Next up in the grammar series: parts of a clause! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4PZ-_0i7uA In this video, we go over subjects and predicates and practice identifying the parts of clauses that include a variety of features, including direct and indirect objects, adverbials, participial phrases, and complements (though we didn’t have time to talk much about complements – … Read more
Next up in the grammar series: phrases! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFU3BlueJ60 You might notice that I didn’t cover participial phrases (sometimes a.k.a. participle phrases) in this video. I thought about it, but a) it would have made this video a lot longer, and b) I’ll cover them when I talk about dangling participles in the editing series (coming soon!) If … Read more
Parts of speech are now complete! Check out CONJUNCTIONS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag2fScTTuGk That’s not all for this series, however — coming next are phrases, clauses, and sentence types. And then, of course, we’ll look at other grammar topics, including common editing errors. FREE DOWNLOAD – PRACTICE Here are the excerpts used for practice near the end … Read more