Write About it Wednesday on a Thursday

This week and next week the third, fourth, and fifth graders at my school (as well as those throughout the state) have been participating in a really fun activity called...the FCAT! (Can you hear the sarcasm?)

A week from Monday my second graders will be taking diagnostic testing that will help drive instruction for third grade. One of those assessments is a new writing performance test which is supposedly similar to what my students will be doing on their writing assessments through PARCC. 

I am linking up with Halle from Across the Hall in 2nd and Kate from Second Grade Sparkle for the writing linky.

We have been working on writing informational booklets and my kids are LOVING IT!

They are turning out so cute!

I....being the control freak that I am...have been providing my students will articles about animals that we read together and then take notes on. We just finished our informational booklet on Loggerhead Sea turtles. I learned so many interesting facts about these turtles! I have been using the National Geographic for Kids website as well as some other articles that I found by goggling to gather enough information for my kids.

I think I am going to subscribe to this magazine for my class next year! I love the website!

After reading the articles together and discussing them (as well as some of the harder vocabulary) we start taking our notes. I am trying to push my kids into writing LOTS of details for each chapter so they have to write at least 4 notes for every subsection.

When we are finished taking notes we put the articles away and work ONLY from our notes. This is hard for second graders. When we did our practice assessment back in the fall a lot of them copied full sentences and paragraphs word for word from the articles. Now we are working on just writing short phrases in our notes and not full sentences to help us put the information in our own words.

When we start our booklets we start by writing our table of contents. This is our guide for the order that we write in. The first two that we have done were really guided step by step. The booklet that we are working on this week (about bottle nosed dolphins) I am really letting them take the lead and work without me. So far so good!

After writing the table of contents then we wrote our introduction together. I am working on teaching them they we don't include EVERY SINGLE DETAIL in our introduction. Just a quick "hello" about what they will be talking about. 

When our introduction is done we work on each chapter together. I do require that in addition to their introduction and conclusion that they have at least four chapters. I feel that kids at this age need to be taught and guided as to what would be an acceptable length for a piece of writing. If I did not set a minimal requirement then I believe that I would get one chapter and they would be finished - to me this is not enough.

After our chapters are written then we worked together on our conclusion. Again, we did this together as I am trying to model the kind of information that should be included.

When all of the writing, editing, and revising is completed then I allow my students to go back and add their pictures, diagrams, and text features. This is actually the part that some of them dread the most. I really think they would rather just keep writing. I can't tell you how many times in the last three weeks I have heard, "Do we have to draw pictures?" or "Do we have to color?". Uh - hello you're kids - you are supposed to like to draw and color!

I am going to leave you with some of the awesome drawings that my kids have drawn!

Have a great night!

Christina :)