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Writing prompts for Nov. 3 - 9

by Jim Wayne in Teachers.Net Gazette

Nov 3, 2013

Jim's writing prompts are one of our most popular features; teachers find them helpful for motivating their students to reflect and write, and people just plain enjoy reading them. Check them out, and share the link!

gazette.teachers.net/gazette/wordpress/james-wayne/21295/

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Managing board work

by Jim

Nov 3, 2013

Do you give Daily Warm Ups, or Board Work to start your classes? How do you manage the sheer numbers of papers? I am a Science teacher with about 30 students in 6 classes. That amounts to 180 papers daily to grade. Do you collect them daily? Do you grade them daily, trade and grade daily, self- grade daily, or let them keep their papers all week an...See More

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Sara On 11/03/13, Jim wrote: > Do you give Daily Warm Ups, or Board Work to start your > classes? How do you manage the sheer numbers of papers? I > am a Science teacher with about 30 students in 6 classes. > That amounts to 180 papers daily to grade. Do you collect > them daily? Do you grade them daily, trade and grade daily, > self- ...See More

yesterday, 2013

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coyoteboy I teach 8th grade math and have about 140 students. We have a warmup sheet that all teachers in our department use; the format is standardized and we all require basically the same elements in the responses, which saves a lot of time getting the kids trained in the beginning of the year. The warmup sheet has spaces for Monday through Friday and I p...See MoreI teach 8th grade math and have about 140 students. We have a warmup sheet that all teachers in our department use; the format is standardized and we all require basically the same elements in the responses, which saves a lot of time getting the kids trained in the beginning of the year. The warmup sheet has spaces for Monday through Friday and I pick them up on Fridays. We discuss the problem together Mondays through Thursdays, and Fridays they are on their own (if we discuss, it's after the warmup sheets have been passed in). They are free, actually they are expected, to correct their work as we discuss, but they have to cross out (rather than erase) the incorrect response so that I can tell which questions they originally got wrong. I don't mind them fixing their answers because I look at the warmup as a practice opportunity rather than an assessment. The Friday problem can be graded right or wrong (again, we agreed on this as a department). I do count off if they turn in papers with incorrect answers to the problems we discussed; there's no reason to turn in a wrong answer after they've heard the discussion and had a chance to fix it.

The first couple weeks of school, I grade the warmups and I'm pretty nitpicky on the details, so that the kids can get that feedback on how I want them done. By the third week of school, they're pretty much trained, and then I check their work much less closely (I don't let them know that!) A quick glance over Monday-Thursday for completion, and a quick right or wrong on Friday's, is all I have to do.

After the second or third week of school, I have the kids turn in warmups every Friday, but I only actually grade them when I need a grade for that week...usually only about every third or fourth week. The rest of the time, they go into the recycling. There's no law that says that every single thing they do has to be graded...it has value as a practice tool (all our warmups are recycled state assessment questions) and as a classroom management tool, and it doesn't have to be graded unless you need that grade. The kids usually don't figure out that not all the warmups are graded. If they do, I remind them that they have no way of knowing whether I'm going to grade this week's warmup or not, so they better do it! This also gives us some slack...if a kid loses his warmup sheet, is absent all week, or something like that, I can swap the lost one (that was supposed to be graded that week) with the one from the previous or following week (that wasn't gonna be graded, but now it's saving the kid from getting a zero). This reduces my grading load and makes the warmup grade work to the students' advantage. I also make the warmup a relatively small part of their average (20%). In a nine week grading period I usually only record three warmup grades.

The warmup is already up there when students enter, they get to work as soon as they come in, and it's great because class starts itself and I am free to take roll, check homework completion, answer questions, etc. instead of giving directions at the start of every class. If the students are not used to it or not very motivated to do it, try using questions that are controversial or will provoke some spirited discussion or even disagreement...they will engage, if only to put their two cents in. It's also a great way to painlessly and sneakily prepare them for quizzes...if the warmup problems bear an uncanny resemblance to the quiz questions, they will notice, especially the good students, and if they don't, you can point it out to them. Once state testing is over, I use math related cartoons, photos from Ripley's Believe It Or Not, newspaper articles that we can crunch numbers with, USA Today graphs, and other stuff.

It's such a valuable strategy that it's worth working out the kinks to make it work for you. Talk to the other teacher in your dept or grade level and see what they are doing. If you can adopt some (or all) of the same procedures, it'll save you a lot of time getting them trained and running smoothly.

Good luck!

yesterday, 2013

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How long a research papers can 8th graders manage?

by Sarah

Nov 4, 2013

Students are writing research papers for a science topic to present to the class. How long a paper is a reasonable expectation for 8th grade? How long a research papers can 8th graders manage?

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Sara On 11/04/13, Sarah wrote:

The answer varies from school to school and certainly from student to student. There aren't any developmental studies out there that answer a question like this. We do have studies that show it's unrealistic to expect a child to walk before 9 months and studies that show it's realistic to look for a child to begi...See More

yesterday, 2013

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Writing prompts for Nov. 10 - 16

by Jim Wayne in Teachers.Net Gazette

Nov 9, 2013

Here's a sample of this week's super duper writing prompts!

November 10: Today is Hero Day in Indonesia. Who is your hero? Why did you choose that person as a hero? What do you admire about him or her?

Happy Birthday, United States Marines! Today in 1775, the Continental Congress created the Marine Corps as a part of the U.S. Navy...See More

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Writing prompts for Nov. 17 - 23

by Jim Wayne in Teachers.Net Gazette

Nov 17, 2013

Writing prompts for the week of November 17-13 are posted online. Here's just a sample of the prompts available for this week. The link below will take you all of this week's writing prompts.

November 17: Queen Elizabeth I became ruler of England in 1558. She ruled until 1603. Her enjoyment of Shakespeare’s plays helped to boost his popu...See More

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MS LA teachers...Help

by Not an english teacher

Nov 18, 2013

Going to do a joint project with the photography teacher. Her students took 4-5 pictures of objects around the school (no people). Now the reading teachers are going to have the students write narratives to tell a story about those pictures.

I have not done much with writing narratives. What I have planned is to do a pre-write with the st...See More

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LA Teacher On 11/18/13, Not an english teacher wrote:

. You're asking them to make up a story? As in tell us what happened in this photo?

You'll find that not every child who can read can also write.... Weak readers are never strong writers and strong readers aren't necessarily strong writers.

Not having people in the photographs...See MoreOn 11/18/13, Not an english teacher wrote:

. You're asking them to make up a story? As in tell us what happened in this photo?

You'll find that not every child who can read can also write.... Weak readers are never strong writers and strong readers aren't necessarily strong writers.

Not having people in the photographs will make it harder not easier to generate writing about the photograph particularly to generate a story. A story about what? A tree? It can be done but what's the goal?

In writing instruction there is often a confusion of goals. What is it you want to accomplish? To further their writing skills or teach a style of writing?

What we do in writing instruction is take students some to many of whom are not strong writers and then ask them to tailor or fit their writing into a genre of writing. The reality is - a genre of writing cannot be taught in any brief period of time but know it's commonly done. If the intention is to expose the kids to the concept of different genres of writing , then two weeks spent doing that is enough time because their attention spans will not hold out for longer than two weeks.

But will they write good narratives based on this project as you've described it? If they pretty much as a group are good writers, then they might. I think though the underlying idea - the photographs - they could strike observers as a catchy idea and is the stuff Principals live to tell parents is creative teaching - I think it's not the best approach for fostering narrative writing. Poetry maybe....

Unless.... these kids are pretty special and they might be. If you want kids to generate language, stories, narratives better to give them a prompt that fosters that.

But I could be wrong and hope your kids went to town with this project.

> Going to do a joint project with the photography teacher. > Her students took 4-5 pictures of objects around the school > (no people). Now the reading teachers are going to have the > students write narratives to tell a story about those > pictures. > > I have not done much with writing narratives. What I have > planned is to do a pre-write with the students. I show a > picture or collage of pictures I have taken of objects. > Kids write a description of what they see in their > journals. Next in groups of 4 they discuss what they wrote. > Then we come back together as a group and discuss the > writings and possibly write a whole class three paragraph > narrative. > > Is this the right approach? The students will probably do a > sloppy copy/peer edit/ and make a final copy on their > Chrome books. Do I need more mini lessons on narrative > writing? We have done setting and such with regular reading > class another things I could do as lessons. This will be a > 5 day project in double class periods of 8th graders. > > What are your suggestions? > > Thank you!

Nov 29, 2013

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