Building Writing Skills ~~ A New TOS Review!!

We are huge fans of The Critical Thinking Co. and over the years have used many of their products. For this review we narrowed our choice down to the Building Writing Skills - Essential Tips and Techniques so that my eldest could work on some of those skills to help make her writing pieces better developed. It was supposed to be a digital product which we would have loved, but unfortunately my Chromebook is not compatible with the digital version. BUT the company is so great and they sent us a physical copy of the book! (Although this is not generally the case since this particular workbook is in the digital version only.)

Building Writing Skills does just that - builds a 6th - 12th grade students skills in writing so that they can sharpen their compositions by making writing more appealing and interesting to readers as well as clearly express their thoughts.  Throughout the workbook the students will cover vivid verbs, active and passive voice, adjectives, analogies, anagrams, nouns, qualifiers, alliteration, similes, metaphors, hyperbole, personification, onomatopoeia (a favorite of ours), and anthropomorphism. After this they will start working on complex and compound sentences, varying their sentence types and exploring different ways to start their sentences. The book also covers phrases and transition words, appositives, repetition and points of view.

These activities are split into multiple choice, fill in the blank, matching, crossword puzzles, as well as just rewriting sentences with the correct items that the student is working on for that activity. There are about 59 activity pages in the 84 page book. The answers for all the activities begin on page 72 and there is a 2 page sample activity for another of their other books at the very end.

My daughter has been doing about 1 activity page per week, sometimes 2 pages, but she was working mostly on the verb section and making them more vivid. Some of them were longer (like the crossword puzzle or when she had to rewrite the sentence with a more "vivid" verb that makes the sentences more interesting. This was very helpful while she's also been taking a writing class as a dual enrolled at the local community college. I believe she's read ahead in the workbook to learn some of the other areas since I think I've seen them in her papers I've edited for her class. That makes a mom happy! (Especially a mom who was an English major in college.)

Even though we had this as a book, it would generally come as an e-book. Then you could download the pages when they were needed or extras if your student needed more work on that particular writing skill. With the activities being just one page for most of them that will make it very easy to add onto your regular workload for the week helping to strengthen those writing skills yet still not overwhelming your student with too much work.

I believe you could also do this workbook out of order very easily. Since this was created for middle and high school students they probably will all know about nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and the like. This helps them make them stronger, interesting, and varied which leads to a more full and complete writing repertoire.

Each page has a small 'learning box' in grey which tells the student about the part of speech they are focusing on.

That is followed by instructions for the activity.

Next is the activity itself which is generally just one page. Some lessons have more pages to work on the concepts being taught so that they are truly cemented in their brains. And you really don't want them to work through this too quickly or they won't have time for the concepts to sink in!

I would highly recommend Building Writing Skills - Essential Tips and Techniques to anyone who has a student in middle or high school. It's an easy supplement to be added to their regular days work and will bring a lot of meat and content to their writing as they beging to add it in to their other work. You can also find The Critical ThinkingCo.  on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and YouTube. The company has also granted our readers this wonderful coupon for 15% off through the end of this year December 2019!

There are many other on the Crew who reviewed other products by The Critical Thinking Co. inculding math games, vocabulary,  critical thinking, and a few others so be sure to check them all out at the link below!