This year, our first professional goal as a fourth grade team was to co-create success criteria and exemplars using our Wonders writing curriculum. In the past, we have had students create success criteria and work on creating exemplars (see previous blog posts), but we had not yet done so using the Wonders writing curriculum. This was for several reasons - getting adjusted to a new curriculum, focusing on adding personalization/autonomy to the reading component first last year, and the difficulty of the writing program. In fourth grade writing, we typically start the year with descriptive paragraphs, which allows us to focus on details, adding support, and paragraph format. Many fourth graders enter the year without these skills or need reminders about basic formatting and organization before we can proceed with more challenging concepts. In the Wonders writing curriculum, the first genre of writing is expository essays with text evidence, which is a big jump. Last year, we used this mostly in a whole group and small group format with students later in the year, then we as teachers created success criteria and exemplars and taught students how to use them to build autonomy. However, this year our goal was to start this earlier in the year and have students engage in the process of creating success criteria and organizing exemplars themselves.
We still started the year with the building blocks of descriptive writing and paragraph format, figurative language, topic sentences/conclusion sentences and supporting details, but we shortened the amount of time we would typically spend focusing on those things and instead went directly into Wonders writing. We led students through a first example of expository writing with text evidence as a class shared writing activity, guiding them through discussing sources and filling out a planner, then working together to use the planner to create a paragraph. We decided as a team that it is more beneficial at this point in fourth grade to have students work on one good paragraph using text evidence, rather than a 5-paragraph essay. This allows us to still focus on mastering the building blocks of writing within this challenging genre of writing. After our shared writing experience, we scaffolded students' second experience with expository writing. with text evidence, as they were much more familiar with the format and procedure of Wonders writing. Students were able to work in partners to discuss the prompt and one of the sources, and we met as a class to discuss the two other sources presented in the Wonders curriculum (there are a total of 3 sources with each prompt). We decided as a team to discuss the two more difficult sources as a class because there was a lot of challenging vocabulary and this would allow us to make sure everyone understood what they were reading. From this point, students worked in partners to fill out a plan in their Reading, Writing Companions, focusing on a central idea, three supporting details (in their own words), and finding one piece of text evidence from each source to support each detail. Finally, students independently used their planners to write paragraphs. This allowed us to get a variety of writing samples for our exemplar activity and to make sure that our exemplar display would truly represent where students are currently at right now with this type of writing. To prepare for the exemplars/success criteria activity, my teammate and I traded writing samples so that students in each class would not be analyzing writing from their own class and to remove that possible distraction. We then sorted through them. selecting a progression of 7 different writing samples that displayed common inclusions/omissions in the writing from fourth grade right now. We did have our own thoughts about what things students might pick out when analyzing the writing samples and putting them in order, however we did not provide that guidance and left it up to students to decide. We put students into groups of 3 or 4 and gave each group the same set of 7 pieces of writing. Students were given directions to read all of the examples, discuss the differences and similarities, strengths and opportunities with their groups, and then label each piece of writing with a sticky note. Each sticky note needed to have a number 1-7 (7 being the best), and 3 bullet point notes about what that piece of writing included or did not included to serve as reasons for why they ordered the exemplars the way that they did. I was impressed with how well most of my students did with this activity, and the quality of the conversations that took place. Many of my sticky notes had comments that were rather "surface" level, such as "good punctuation" and "neat handwriting", but students were discussing things like what made a good conclusion, which conclusions actually mentioned the central idea, and what text evidence actually looked like when incorporated correctly. Students who are typically very quiet or not very confident showed themselves to be leaders in these groups and had strong opinions about what made a good paragraph or what was missing from others. We have done this process in the past as a fourth grade team, with previous classes, and I always enjoy the discussions it brings out. However, I did not know what to expect with this different format of writing through Wonders and teaching text evidence so early in the year. I was pleasantly surprised! Going forward, the co-created exemplars and success criteria are displayed on the wall in our classroom. They will remain there throughout the year because this is a type of writing that we focus on a lot and in. different contexts - with opinions, with personalized research, and to communicate our learning with our inquiry projects. Students will use the display to analyze their own writing, to determine where they are currently at, and what they need to do to improve and move forward. This will help build autonomy and student confidence.
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AuthorCourtney Hayes is currently a teacher at Lone Tree Elementary Magnet School in Colorado. She has teaching experience in both primary and intermediate grades, and is passionate about personalizing her instruction to meet the needs of all students. Archives
April 2021
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