Writing Idea

3 thoughts on “Writing Idea”

1. Robert Harrell

   January 7, 2013 at 9:28 pm

   Today I put up a series of “sentence frames” (that’s the buzzword in the Constructing Meaning camp) so we could talk about students’ break:
   1. I went to
   2. I saw
   3. I received
   4. I ate
   5. I played
   After we had established meaning and I had modeled what I was looking for, students copied the start of the sentence and then wrote down something to finish the sentence. Then we talked about the different things that students did during the break; in most classes we talked primarily about the first two with some references to the others. Most students went to the cinema and saw a film, so we talked about the films they saw and whether or not they were good. We touched on receiving – most students received clothes*. In my infamous fifth period we learned that one student went to Five Guys (a hamburger chain) and ate five double cheeseburgers and French fries and drank Dr. Pepper. (After students had written down their answers, this class sat in a circle; unfortunately, my other classes are too big to do that. While I had to keep reminding them to speak German and have a single conversation, the students were engaged.)

   *I got to warn them about the pitfall in German with this one. It works in two directions. The German for “I received” is “ich bekam”, which looks like “I became”. English speakers want to say that they became a student but say instead that they received a student; on the other hand, native German speakers learning English will say things like, “I went to McDonald’s and became a cheeseburger” (instead of “got” a cheeseburger). My students enjoyed knowing that they aren’t the only ones who fall into language traps.

   Tomorrow we will continue the conversation because we weren’t quite through. Then I will have them do a timed writing on the subject of “My Christmas Break” and see how well the classes do. I will, of course, provide them with connector words.

   After they have written, I will use the document camera to put up some of their writing for the class to read and discuss. (That will be on Wednesday.) When things start to wind down, we’ll get back to some reading: “Poor Anne” for level 1; “The Trip of His Life” for level 2; “Emil and the Detectives” for levels 3/4/AP.

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2. Bob Patrick

   January 9, 2013 at 3:51 pm

   I love this. I have done things like this before, but I think you describe it beautifully, Ben. Robert, I did a similar thing after return from the holidays. I only had 4 starter sentences, but we circled the hell out of them all hour long. Students, on the next day, did a timed write for 20 minutes about what they did during the holidays. It was very clear that the day before if I had asked them to do that they would not have been able to do that. Huge success! Ben, I and my student teacher are going to try the writing idea soon.

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   1. Ben Slavic

      January 9, 2013 at 10:56 pm

      And of course I shelved that idea once I read about Roberts’ sentence frames. Dude. They rock. I could work with those for the next month. We have only had two days of school and I already have three grades in the book. One for jGR for the two days, which I keep as a single running grade all term (I think that Robert does this too), one on the writing they did, and one on the quiz that the quiz writer wrote during the discussion. If you want to light a fire under a kid, grade often. Or at least collect work and grade one out of every four or five things you collect, if you are like me (lazy). You don’t have to enter everything in the gradebook! You just think you do!

      So Bob let me know how that other idea works (boston.com) if you and your student teacher get to it before me.

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