Review: The Cozy Essay Course
Retired Canadian school teacher Marie Rackham does it again with her fun, UNintimidating way of teaching necessary English basics. The Basic Cozy Essay Course is a five-lesson, easy-to-follow course with separate tutorials ranging from four to 17 minutes in length. Considering these lengths, it’s easy to imagine how The Basic Cozy Essay Course will fit into your Language Arts teaching time, and mesh well with an overall curriculum.
The course is aimed at your students in 6th grade and up; even adults will benefit from Rackham’s fun teaching style. Her 30-day, money-back guarantee further reinforces her assurances that this style works and works well in teaching your 12-year-olds-and-up how to write essays. It’s not as daunting or traumatic as you may recall from your own school days! Really! Remember Rackham’s favorite teaching slogan, learned from a college professor and earned from her personal failures and triumphs: “No one fails if they have the tools.” With The Basic Cozy Essay Course, you’ll have those tools.
Rackham walks you through her garden, tidal pools, and the beach as she talks you through her well-tested, step-by-step method. Her warmth comes across the screen and her tone of voice is light and encouraging, nearly sing-song at points. She is quite articulate, and, though the format is not closed captioned, there are extensive on-screen graphics that, word by word, change colors to iterate her points throughout the presentation. This format tempts audio, visual, and tactile learners out of the natural shudderings that go with an essay assignment, and onto writing essays, even those with footnotes and bibliography. Your students may say, as my own daughter did, “This isn’t so hard after all!”
All of Rackham’s courses are well laid out and well packaged. Other titles include The Basic Cozy Grammar Course, The Basic Cozy Punctuation Course, and The Basic Cozy Spelling Course.
