Below is the three paragraph essay they used for the pre-assessment
I remember three distinct things about fishing on the Rogue River with my grandpa. First, his boat was old. I remember the smell of the cracking leather seats and the way my hands barely fit around the brown steering wheel. Second, my grandpa was fun on the river. He would make the boat go around in circles until we both felt dizzy or I got a little scared. The fish were supposed to come closer to our boat so we could catch them easier. That never happened. Third, fishing was not always fun. For instance, I never liked putting the worm on the hook because it felt squishy and slimy between my fingers. Sometimes, my grandpa would let me use cheese instead. I also didn’t like waking up early; although, my grandpa let me take naps in the boat. I will never forget fishing with my grandpa.
I also have many memories on the Coos River about crawdad hunting. The river was an amazing place. The trees hovered over the shallow moving water as if they were protecting it. I would go with my family. My dad was always the most excited, my mom would make sure we were safe, and my big sister would scream every time she caught a crawdad. We had a good system. To begin, we would catch as many as we could and keep them in bucket full of water. After that, we would boil them over a fire my mom would build. Lastly, we would crack their shells and eat them. I’ll always remember crawdad hunting on the Coos River.
I went on a three day white water rafting trip down the Deschutes River. The weather changed a lot. During the day, it was so hot. At night, on the other hand, the wind would blow the cold air from the water up along the banks of the river. One day, we stopped to jump off a forty foot rock. It took me fifteen minutes staring down the edge until I was brave enough to jump. We also saw a rattlesnake. I was walking to the river to check the raft when I heard a rattle. The snake began to lift its head off the ground and stare at me. Luckily, our guide came by and waked it with a shovel before it could strike me. Rafting down the Deschutes River was a blast.
This is the correct highlighting and underlining for their pre-assessment. The Thesis and conclusion could be multiple answeres.
I remember three distinct things about fishing on the Rogue River with my grandpa. First, his boat was old. I remember the smell of the cracking leather seats and the way my hands barely fit around the brown steering wheel. Second, my grandpa was fun on the river.He would make the boat go around in circles until we both felt dizzy or I got a little scared. The fish were supposed to come closer to our boat so we could catch them easier. That never happened. Third, fishing was not always fun. For instance, I never liked putting the worm on the hook because it felt squishy and slimy between my fingers. Sometimes, my grandpa would let me use cheese instead. I also didn’t like waking up early; although, my grandpa let me take naps in the boat. I will never forget fishing with my grandpa.
I also have many memories on the Coos River about crawdad hunting. The river was an amazing place. The trees hovered over the shallow moving water as if they were protecting it. I would go with my family. My dad was always the most excited, my mom would make sure we were safe, and my big sister would scream every time she caught a crawdad. We had a good system. To begin, we would catch as many as we could and keep them in bucket full of water. After that, we would boil them over a fire my mom would build. Lastly, we would crack their shells and eat them. I’ll always remember crawdad hunting on the Coos River.
I went on a three day white water rafting trip down the Deschutes River. The weather changed a lot. During the day, it was so hot. At night, on the other hand, the wind would blow the cold air from the water up along the banks of the river. One day, we stopped to jump off a forty foot rock. It took me fifteen minutes staring down the edge until I was brave enough to jump. We also saw a rattlesnake. I was walking to the river to check the raft when I heard a rattle. The snake began to lift its head off the ground and stare at me. Luckily, our guide came by and waked it with a shovel before it could strike me. Rafting down the Deschutes River was a blast.
Meets Common Core State Standards:
2. Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content. (Matches with district – WR.10 & WR.05)
2. Demonstrate command of the conventions of Standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing. (Matches with district - WR.17)
When I took over my class, they were a week into their nonfiction and expository writing section. They had written five sentence paragraphs without much of a structure, so I thought I would focus on the organization aspect of the writing standard. My biggest goal was to have my students be able to write and expository essay, meeting the common core state standards for writing 2 and language 2 (written above). I knew that they needed more instruction with how to use and find support for their ideas so I didn’t need to assess them on that. From my goals and objectives (listed below) what I needed to know was what they knew about the organization of an essay. Before I could have them do their outline work, I needed to know how much I needed to instruct them on what goes where. If they couldn’t identify what a main idea was, they probably wouldn’t know where it goes. I wanted to know what they knew about organizing an essay and I thought having them write an essay would take away from what they actually knew—they would be so caught up in the writing that assessing their organization skills may have gotten lost. To remedy this obstacle, I wrote an essay and had them identify the main ideas, details, topics, conclusions, and the transitions. I still wanted to assess their writing skills, so I had them write a thesis statement and a conclusion for the three body paragraphs I wrote. This way I was able to know if they knew where certain elements went in an essay, if they knew how to write a thesis and a conclusion, and I could check their command of standard English. I also chose to write an essay to show them what a well written expository essay looks like. I was able to use my essay throughout my unit to show them how my process for writing went. I also used the same essay to show them how to fill out a graphic organizer so that they would have an example of an essay they had already been introduced. They also liked the fact that I had to write an essay as well.
Goals
1) Students will know how to effectively convey and support their ideas.
2) Students will be able to use a variety of transitions to convey complex ideas, concepts, and information.
3) Students will make use of their own experiences, opinions, observations, and ideas as sources for genuine writing.
4) Students will be able to write an expository essay in a five paragraph format.
Objectives (under means of assessment, I addressed how I met all of my objectives)
1) Students will be able to connect their experiences and values to a piece of literature through an expository essay explaining how their ideas relate to the theme in a memoir.
2) Students will be able to organize their ideas and information in an outline before writing their essay.
3) Students will be able to revise a rough draft of an essay, by identifying any spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors.
4) Students will be able to identify a variety of convincing types of evidence from the text and their lives to support their ideas in an expository essay during a twenty minute work time.
5) Students will be able to connect the relationship of ideas through clear transitions in an expository essay.
Implementation
Because I didn’t want to waste my supervising teachers supplies, I printed my essay on half sheets of paper and then projected the instructions on the screen from a PowerPoint. They were used to PowerPoint directions, so my hope was for them to feel comfortable. You can see my PowerPoint slide with the directions I gave them in the above section: Students prior knowledge (pre-assessment). They also got high lighters, which was good for the visual learners and having something to manipulate was good for my ELL students.
What I learned
The class average was a 51%. Half the class identified the main ideas, details, topics, and conclusions correctly, and the rest were mostly confused with the difference between main ideas and details. This told me that I should show them how I chose my main ideas and details, and then show the students what main ideas and details do for an essay as well as where to put them. While most of the class tried to underline the transitions, and most got at least, two correct, only four students correctly underlined all of the transitions. Four students wrote a correct thesis and conclusion, but most at least tried. The confusion was clear. They had been working with theme in the weeks before my teaching. Many of them wrote more of a theme statement than a thesis. An example of a student’s thesis statement that was more a theme statement is: It’s good to spend time with your family to make memories. An example of a well written thesis statement is: There are three memories on three different rivers that I’ll never forget. It’s not the thesis I wrote, but it works. It tells the reader what they’ll be reading about and why it matters. This told me that I would have to give them some examples and to teach them what a thesis is. This also told me that before I taught what a thesis is, I had to explain and show the difference between a theme and a thesis. Besides content, this pre-assessment activity taught me a little about management. I learned that passing out papers is something I should always have planned. I had my supervising teacher help me pass out the materials, but it still took a lot longer than I had given it. This was also my first day not being able to focus on just one student, which was more difficult than I had thought. This pre-assessment informed me on what I needed to teach and how I needed to teach it. I decided to give them a practice graphic organizer and essay that we would go through as a class to get them ready for my post-assessment.
How I handed their pre-assessments back.
I handed back their pre-assessments and then went through a PowerPoint (refer to 3rd lesson PowerPoint above) I had made that had the blank essay on the first slide, then the highlighted topic and conclusion on the next, the main ideas highlighted on the next, the details highlighted on the next, and finally the transitions underlined. I told them to fix what they needed to fix.
Before I gave my students their post assessment, I knew I had to give them instruction and practice with graphic organizers and with transferring information from an outline to essay form. To do this, I gave them an organizer (the image above and to the left) for them to fill out. I presented it to the 9th grade PLC and as a group they decided we should fill in some of the boxes for examples. The last box is for the poem "Sympathy" and since they haven't worked with poems yet, we filled in all the main ideas for them. They just needed to fill in the details. My main goal with this practice was for them to understand the order of an essay and how to transfer information from an organizer into sentence form. This practice also helped them find support for their essay in an easy way. I showed them my graphic organizer for the essay I wrote for their pre-assessment. I also color coded it so that they would be able to see where the topics, main ideas, details, and conclusions go in the graphic organizer compared to where they went in the essay. As a class, we brainstormed what main ideas and details were in Black Boy, by Richard Wright. It went well. I think showing them how I did it, then doing it with them, then letting them do it on their own worked well as gradual release mode. I did the same when it was time to convert the information from the graphic organizers into sentence form. We wrote the first paragraph as a class. I had them choose the wording but I directed the organization to make sure it was right. Then, they were to write the rest of the essay on their own. I used their essays as a formative assessment to let me know what I needed to teach to get them ready for my post-assessment.
This practice pre-writing and essay was the biggest form of formative assessment I used. It took up an entire week. I had them write down what was helpful, what wasn't helpful, and what they were still needing further instruction with, four different times throughout my unit. This was pretty helpful. I thought the further instruction section would direct my lessons for the next days, but mostly they were very individual, so I would try and explain those questions to the individual students. If there wasn't time to do so, I would address the questions with the whole class. If more than one student had the same question, I would then address the entire class and have students who got it explain it. The truly helpful part was the "what was helpful" part. For example, with the transition chain sentence activity: I didn't think they liked it from the way they were acting or that they understood the connection, but over half the class commented that it was helpful and fun. From that, I learned that it is a good activity, but my directions needed to be simpler
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