Class Meeting November 13th

Class Meeting November 13^th

Jon McCall

Our lesson today focused on teaching writing strategies. We learned about and practiced several different techniques for getting our students to write in fun, engaging, and valuable ways.

1. We began the lesson with a warm-up activity called “Tea Party.” This activity is designed to introduce students to the characters of a book prior to reading it. In this activity each student is assigned a character and does a brief reading about their whoever they have been assigned. After this, students circulate the room interviewing each other and recording information about each character. By doing this the hope is that students will be more familiar with the characters of a story before they begin reading. This way children can better understand readings and focus their thoughts on the plot of the story and higher-level ideas in the text.

2. After this we reviewed the answers to the online quiz that all of us took on our week off, clarifying answers that students struggled on.

3. We also talked about the two upcoming assignments due the next week

I-Search Paper

·      2-3 pages

·      Personal narrative describing your research process

·      Research a topic that you are teaching in your class or something else

·      Format

o   Identify topic

o   Come up with questions

o   How you addressed questions

o   What you learned

FAQ Paper

·      Construct a series of Frequently Asked Questions and their answers on a topic you are covering in your class

·      Format

o   Title

o   Intro paragraph

o   5 higher level questions about the topic

o   Use hyperlinks to essays answering each question

·      The hardest part about this is that you have to create hyperlinks that link the question to the answer.

How do you create hyperlinks? Watch this video!

 

4. Teaching writing

We discussed the idea that although it has been used in teaching for generations, data suggests that grammar instruction does not actually improve students’ writing.

5. Slideshow: a meta-analysis of educational research found writing instruction techniques that had statistical evidence of success included

·      Teaching students to summarize

·      Collaborative writing

·      Specific product goals

·      Word processing

·      Sentence combining – model putting two short sentences together

·      Pre-writing

·      Inquiry activities – engaging students in analyzing data

·      Process writing

·      Using models (mentor texts)

6. We viewed a lesson by two students on literal and inferential reading of poetry that used group reading strategies and collages to think about a poem. The lesson focused on the poem "I know why the caged bird sings" by Maya Angelou:

7. Slideshow: We saw another slideshow describing why it is that teaching grammar does not work.

·      Teaching grammar DOES NOT WORK!

·      Errors happen for a reason

·      We should see these errors as teachable moments and talk about them

8. RAFT activity – we used a writing technique called RAFT, in which students decide how they will write by first determining the Role, Audience, Form, and Topic of their writing piece. This technique could be used to have students a) engage in writing, and b) write from multiple perspectives about an issue.