Tuesday, March 2, 2010
The wonders of student writing
Student writing is addressed with worksheets, read-a- longs and games. Most days I come in early during their skills block. The skills block includes the expectations for the Benchmark test. Today I want able to see an sample of the students' writing. Not all of these students are from Mrs. P's class. She teaches the mid-level students during this time. I noticed a lot of the students were attaching -ing to infinitive words that needed to be changed such as "exploreing" and haveing". Many also still use a phonetectic based spelling system such as, "yous" for use and my favorite, because it is so creative, "perfefshinal" for professional. The word believe was hard for most students with spells like , "beliefs"( awhile correct spelling not the word they meant), "belives" and "beleive"the last one I'm sure is common for students and must be one of the difficult ones because the teacher had wrote the word on the board.
One student didn't put any distinctive spaces between words. Some students tried to use commas, but used them incorrectly or was a simple imitation of what the teacher had on the board. I was told that they learned how to use commas in the previous grade. I was impressed that one of the students had use colons correctly (half the time)in their paper, which means they must have had a lesson on them.
One student tried to spell the word "animal," "anaimale" and then "amale"
In this particular lesson plan the was called a Self Portrait Poem, it was more of a listing than a poem, one student number their traits. In other lessons, students are being taught the 3 paragrpah form: intro., body and conclusion.
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I had a student that used semicolons correctly throughout her story and it shocked me too! I was so impressed I asked Mrs. L about the student and she said that she is her top student and the last child of a large family that has been active at the school for years. She said that her parents are very involved and she comes from a long line of writers and artists. It always impresses me to see how much active parenting can do.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting that one of the students didn’t have spacing between words. At this level I think that would be an expectation, do you think it was a penmanship issue, or a miscue?
I love that we can see a lot of the things we have been learning in class actually in our classrooms! What is so great about the comma situation is that they're trying to explore new sentences forms and take chances in their writing. My classroom teacher, Ms R, actually gave me some homework :) and it was to read a book about teaching students to read and it made this amazing point that students may know how to write really well and start to excel, but when you teach them new things (even though they learned commas the previous year) you have to allow time for them to adjust, and during htat adjustment period, their writing may drop back down several levels. But this time, when they start to excel again, their writing will be even better. It makes me so excited that your students are taking chances and exploring in their writing!
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