Inquiry Writing Focus - Reflection Weeks 4, 5, and 6

It has been a few weeks since i reflected on how this has been going unfortunately, time has flown by so quickly in recent weeks and i just haven’t had the chance to sit down and reflect on how my inquiry is going!  Will try and make up for this now.

Our writing programme is ticking along nicely, with our focus still being on ‘Exposition Writing.’  We have completed a second piece of writing.  The student’s first looked at an exemplar of writing on the topic ‘Kids Should be Kids’.  I then got the students to argue against this idea.  We use the ideas the author had used but did the reverse. The focus for this exposition was to include at least one rhetorical question, and to use time and text connectives.  This was pretty successful, and the students we able to do most of the planning themselves using the planning template that we used from the exemplar previously.  The only thing they are still struggling with is being able to come up with two reasons to back up their originally opinion statement.  Hopefully this will come with more practise, as I eventually want them to be able to do this themselves without me needing to spoon feed them ideas, or having to get the ideas from their classmates sharing.  We will be self assess our writing on Monday and i will give these students feedback on their completed writing.

This week the whole class will be rotating around 4 different arguments writing ideas for and against each argument as they go.  Then the class, including the inquiry group, will select the argument that most interests them to write their next exposition on.  Im hoping that this time around, the inquiry group won’t need to meet with me for as much time to create their plans, as they should have a wealth of ideas in which to use to create their plans.  The focus for the writing will be to ensure there are two clear reasons for each of our topic paragraph sentences.

Overall, i think this writing unit is going well.  The inquiry group seems to find this factual writing topic a lot easier to achieve the goal of ‘adding extra depth and detail’, and the improvement in the girls writing is greater.  When i reflect on why this is it could be because they don’t have to use their imagination as much as they had to with narrative writing.  Exposition is based on your opinion of a topic and your reasons for thinking this.

Inquiry Writing Focus - Week 3 Reflections

This week i found that things flowed even smoother during group rotations due to the students being used to the routines and structure of the lessons that we have had for the couple of weeks.  The inquiry group continued their narrative stories using the planning template they created in their books discussed in my reflection last week.  We also started our new genre focus this week exposition writing.  The whole class wrote a sample on the topic ‘all Vardon School students must now wear a uniform to school every day’.   The students then had the opportunity to assess their samples against the success criteria

These are my observations or thoughts about this group from the week:

• ·         The template the inquiry group created was useful and they could write this with little discussion and motivation from me – they could create their own ideas to add to this without as much discussion needed as the previous time. 
• ·         The template that they created didn’t have as much detail as the previous plan they did for the soccer ball story.  This could be either because the extra detail icons weren’t on their page as it was on the previous plan and/or because we didn’t spend as much time talking about their plan like we did last time.
• ·         All four students used this template structure to create a plan for the planning part of their exposition sample.  This is exactly what i wanted, for these students to have a template they felt confident using when they are required to write a sample, or a piece of writing and a template is not provided for them to use.  However . . . . this wasn’t quite the right writing genre to use this template for i.e. there’s not setting in an exposition so you don’t need to plan for it, but they’re getting the idea and giving it a go now which is awesome to see!
• ·         The boys are making good progress with experimenting with new ways to add interest with their writing and writing for longer periods of time, but the girls are still at a standstill.  They take a very long time to get started and having taken many risks at all with trying new things in their writing to add interest.  I know one of the reasons they are at a standstill is because they find it really hard to come up with ideas.  They can plan out what will happen at each point of the story (the intro, the problem, the solution and the conclusion), but find it hard to add in the bits in between to connect all these ideas together.   I think the fact they sit together could be part of the problem too as they then kind of feed off each other negative vib about being stuck and having no ideas.  It will be interesting to see how these girls fair with their writing during expositions, as being a factual piece of writing, they may find these easier to write and to add details to.
• ·         Tickled pink and grow for green is going really well, having the kids talk about their successes and justifying their reasons and really positive.

Inquiry Writing Focus - Week 2 reflections

This week was our second week with our inquiry project throughout the senior syndicate.  I found this week was a little less stressful than the previous week, i think because each of my groups has now established themselves with a piece of writing and are up and running.  My input now with each of my other groups is now less of a facilitator but more of a prompter of goals giver of feedback and feedforward so i found it a lot more manageable this week.  I enjoyed using the ‘proved it pink’ and ‘grow it green’ feedback/forward with all groups this week.  Having the students justify where and why they had ‘proved it pink’ using the success criteria was extremely satisfying and rewarding.

Meeting of the group during staff meeting this week:

This was a very productive and informative meeting this week.  We looked over each of our samples and discussed the commonalities we noticed between all of our samples – See these listed below:  

Looking over our time 1 data/samples and things that we’re finding a similar between all of our samples:

• They are not re-reading writing to check for sense
• brainstorming - not in order and hap hazard
• editing needs work
• using words and language but not for the way they are intended for - not using them to enhance their writing
• no development of setting time or place
• no explanation of what their story is about and why the events are happening
• lots of telling -  no showing - little to no adjectives
• not using dialogue or not using it correctly
• don’t know the difference between formal and informal writing
• using slang and think its awesome writing
• making sense
• endings are not always satisfactory

It was heartening to see that we all had students that had similar areas to work on.  We decided that planning was still an area of need for our students and decided to continue to make this the focus and goal for our inquiry groups.  We also decided it was important for the students to learn to plan using a template they could create themselves, rather than always relying on a teacher to provide this – as during assessments, we do not provide them with templates.  Over the next few days our student will be creating a narrative story with the same learning goal as before using a plan that ive titled with my students ‘the box plan’. 

Divide the page into 6 with the headings below:

• Setting
• characters
• problem
• solution
• ending
• powerful words

We all decided that the next focus for writing would be picture prompts - 3 pictures to choose from, but each teacher will select what is best for their group.  http://writingprompts.tumblr.com/page/55

 My students found this plan easy to use and i was pleased with what they came up with.  Our lessons followed the same structured lessons as the first rotation, and children are due for teacher feedback after Monday’s session.  Completion of this story is due Wednesday.  We will then be completing samples for our new writing focus which is ‘exposition’ on Thursday.  Exposition writing is to help tie in with speeches, which are happening this term. 

 Thoughts for the week ahead:

I am interested to see how we will cover some of the writing needs for our students during ‘exposition’ writing, I haven’t sat down and thought it through yet, but some of the learning needs may be hard to cover off during a writing genre such as this.  However as with all learning needs, teachers find a way to cover what is required with the time and the focus they have, so we will see how we go!