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!
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