SAS® Curriculum Pathways®

 

SAS® Curriculum Pathways® is a wonderful tool for 8th grade and high school students and teachers (I have used some of the activities for 6th and 7th grade also). Curriculum Pathways® is free for teachers and students throughout the United States. If you are in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System, you can ask your Technology Facilitator for a Curriculum Pathways® login. All other teachers can click on the "Register for a subscription" link on the home page. All lessons within Curriculum Pathways® are based on state standards.

I attended a virtual conference with NCDLA (North Carolina Distance Learning Association) and one of the sessions was with Mrs. Deborah Gray from SAS® Curriculum Pathways®. She was talking about the Writing Reviser Toolbox within the English and  Communication Skills section. Now, before all other curriculum areas tune out, everyone has a writing component, and can use this resource. 

The writing toolbox has many different components. A couple of these are Sentence Structure (Quick Launch # 943) and Strong Verbs (Quick Launch #1335). Sentence Structure will help students build stronger and clearer sentences within their reports. Strong Verbs looks at how often students use weak verbs and help them to change those into strong verbs. Students can view these on their own and email the teacher their finished work. Don't worry, student email accounts are not needed. Everything is stored on the Curriculum Pathways® server. If you don't have access to computers, you can show the whole class the lesson and print out the sheet for students to finish.

The interactivity Writing Reviser (Quick Launch #1242) allows students to copy and paste any document they have written. Once they have pasted the document into the reviser, students can see the word count, determine how many prepositional phrases they have, run on sentences, sentence fragments, etc. This could be a very powerful tool in helping students to revise their writing.

I copied this blog post into the Writing Reviser. There were some things that I needed to revise! Not only is the Writing Reviser a good tool for students, it is a good tool for everyone. By the way, did I mention that everything within Curriculum Pathways® is free for teachers? Be sure to go and check out this marvelous resource.



Image from Curriculum Pathways® homepage.