We started the day by writing an open letter. I liked the idea of writing to some person or group that you know won't respond. There are so many applications for the classroom. The first two examples of application of the open letter include writing: a letter to John Adams stating your feelings about his policies during his time in office, or writing a letter to congress stating your position about the electoral college, and whether or not it should be used to continue electing the president of the United States. The open letter works for three main reasons. The first being that students have yet another opportunity to write. Also, it allows students to demonstrate what they have learned about a topic. Lastly, it gives students the chance to "sound off" on a topic in which they have some interest.
We also discussed the elements of the argumentative piece of writing. To this end, we broke down the important elements of an argument which included the us of statistics, facts, and evidence to support a position. If I remember correctly, we looked at argument writing through the lens of common core standards. We took parts of the persuasive writing common core, and organized them from high school down to elementary. After doing that, we had some time to identify nouns, adjectives and verbs throughout the standards to get familiar with them. I thought this was a nice way to get us to see the interconnectedness of the standards from elementary to high school.
Even though we were down one person, our group continued to fine tune ideas we had about our demonstration lesson that is quickly approaching. I was also able to come to terms with the fact that the lesson is a starting point for our inquiry project. Prior to me arriving at this conclusion, was stressing about the demonstration, thinking that we had to have a completed, polished product. (I know that we were told that this was not the case, but I still envisioned otherwise.)
I thought the presentation of the terms "Overwriter" and "Underwriter" to proved to be a powerful way to get students to think about their own writing, as well to help them begin thinking about what they need to develop into better writers.
Kenny,
ReplyDeleteYour comment struck me funny about the fact that you've been told that the demo is not to be a finished piece, but you couldn't really wrap your head around that. I know we say that, and I know how it's taken, but after a while you see what we mean. The important thing is that you see it for your students though. I often tell mine that what they write doesn't have to be polished just yet, but they don't work that way. As I often say, "They didn't get to be seniors by being wrong." They are trained to be right and when they are told they don't have to be, they either don't believe it, or don't understand it. Either way, it doesn't relieve all that much stress until they can see it. To that end, I often show my students first draft writing of mine, so they can see where I am and that I'm struggling to get the words down in the way I want them to read.
Rich
Thanks for the feedback Rich. It's funny, I now know what my students go through when I assign work. I see all of the time. I give them a clear explanation of the work to be done, but often times there are a handful of students that place undo stress on themselves about things that I did not tell them. I guess the difficult piece, as you mentioned, is being able to see it for yourself, as opposed to being told.
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