why spidersmart?

Connection, Community, Expansion, and Strength.

Spiders are very independent in their work (like SpiderSmart students learn to be with mentorship.) They take pride in what they've created (the web), like our students take pride in their work. They work diligently and carefully, paying attention to every detail of the web (like our kids pay attention to every detail in carefully crafting an essay.)  Lastly, a web has SO MANY parts -- it's such a complex creation -- and that's how we feel about our SpiderSmart learning philosophies and practices.  Our approaches to every student (who we believe to also be complex and intricately developed as a learner) are vast and varied.  There's a precision to our "building" of each and every one of our students.  Our educational ethos is based on that precision -- that individualized curricula, that close, focused attention to every student -- and the appreciation that every single student is different and deserves a myriad of approaches.

sharpening your writing: lazy sentence beginnings.

Avoid starting your sentences with “It” and “There”:

It is…

It was…

There is…

There are…

There was…

There were…

These are all lazy ways to start an idea. Why? You make your reader guess what you mean by using “It”.  It what?  What is it?

Using “There” is also rather useless. Think about it. What is the difference in these two ides?

There were ten men standing in line.
Ten men were standing in line.

Answer: Nothing—except the first one has the useless “There were” at the beginning.

All “There is/are/was/were” does is point to something.  It is almost like walking up to someone and saying, “I am going to talk to you now,” instead of just talking to the person!

There is always a better way to begin a sentence.

Oops! 

A better way to start a sentence always exists.

That’s better! You have to practice to see the different ways, though, so let’s look at some examples and then do a few exercises. The first sentence has a lazy beginning, but the second one corrects this by making a more direct sentence.

It is necessary to study.
Studying is necessary.

It was a rainy day, so we could not have recess.
We could not have recess because it was a rainy day. 

There was nothing to stop me from getting an “A” on the test.
Nothing could stop me from getting an “A” on the test. 

There are too many cars on this narrow road!
Too many cars are on this narrow road! 

There is a lot of sugar in this candy.
A lot of sugar is in this candy. 

Do you get the idea now? You need to take away the lazy part and rearrange the sentence. Sometimes, you can even find a whole new way to express the idea. 

There is a lot of sugar in this candy.
This candy is loaded with sugar! 

It does not take much to avoid these awkward sentence beginnings once you know a few helpful tricks.

meet jason ellison.

Jason Ellison earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from George Mason University in 1994. He taught undergraduate courses in English composition, literature, and creative writing at both Northern Virginia Community College and George Mason University for 12 years while working for SpiderSmart as an essay evaluator and center teacher. For four years he created the writing curricula for the Washington Leadership Program, which allowed students from Sookmyung University of Seoul, South Korea to attend a variety of seminars and events in Washington, DC each July. Now that he is able to work full-time for SpiderSmart, he develops website and printed material, creates study guides, oversees online students, and generally handles whatever else needs to be done. When he’s not working, he writes fragments of a novel, tries to organize his thousands of photographs, and attempts to train his family’s new kitten to stay off his keyboard.

spidersmart online: an in-house private tutor.

Welcome! Let me tell you about SpiderSmart’s Online Reading & Writing Program. We’ve been helping students become active readers and stronger writers for nearly 20 years, and we’ve been doing it online since 2003. With our program, students have access to a virtual library of over 1,500 real books that range from mysteries to fantasies to biographies to Newbery Award winners. With each book read, the student completes an online assignment designed specifically for that book that includes sections focused on vocabulary building, reading comprehension skills, and essay writing. A real teacher provides feedback consisting of explanations, examples, discussion, and methods of improvement for every assignment. We provide a teacher-mentor to work directly with every student, so the focus is on the student and feedback is consistently building crucial skills needed to strengthen reading and writing abilities. It truly is like having a private tutor in your home.

The online program is available for grades 2 to 12, and we even have SAT prep courses. We also adjust skill levels so students needing more help or requiring more challenging material are never overwhelmed or bored. Please visit our website to learn more!

As told by Jason Ellison.