The Continuing Saga...

I had to add another blog about my fifth hour today. Every day we do MUG (Mechanics, Usage, Grammar) sentences as mini-lessons. I started doing these as KeyNote presentations last year instead of on the overhead the way I had been doing these for years. By using KeyNote, I can then put up the corrected sentence so that they can see what it looks like instead of just listening to the corrections. One of today's sentences had to do with the city of Ur, a city found in the Bible. The city name was not capitalized so it looked like ur. We go through the sentences together, making the corrections as we go. When we got to that part of the sentence, someone said, "Ur is written incorrectly. It should be you are or the contraction you're." (If the student had looked at the whole sentence, he/she would have realized that answer was wrong.) It dawned on me that when some of the students saw ur, they automatically viewed it as text writing. I had to chuckle at that. Times certainly have changed. I have done these sentences for years, but that was the first time anyone looked at "ur" that way. Now the question is will this group or future groups be able to go from one type of writing to another easily, or will they just want to use text messaging because it is easier for them.