Students at my Tuesday Experience have had practice with focus and organazation in their writing. Students as a class had developed a story focusing on a begining and maiddle and during writing time they were asked to work on creating their own ending to this story. The teacher reminded students that the ending might have a problem that could be solved. During this time I worked with one particular student to develop sentences for his ending. Not all of the students were able to come up with problems in their endings and resolutions, but the teacher said she will continue to work on begining, middle, and end.
I have seem my Tuesday Experience pass back student work to be corrected. This work often focuses on correcting capitalization, punctuantion and spelling errors. Occassional I have seen papers come back to students asking for some more details, but this is less often the focus. Often when papers are returned to students to be corrected the focus is on conventions.
So far in Tuesday Experience I have yet to see focus on elaboration and support, transitions and fluency, word variety and sentence variety. I have seen my teacher and myself revising students written work focusing primarly on conventions and word spacing.
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3 comments:
Katie,
After reading this post, I can see why most students believe that "neatness" is one of the most important qualities of their writing. All too often teachers do not focus on elaboration and depth, but rather simple qualities such as neatness, punctuation, and spelling. This may be a good opportunity for you to implement different techniques in your lessons for Tuesday Experience; you will be able to see how students react to another style. If nothing else, you will be prepared to use different methods in student teaching as well as in your own classroom.
I came to a similar conclusion, like Taylor I can also see why student would think that neatness is so important, if nothing else this will allow you to see what you may not want to do in your own classroom or maybe you could work with the students on elaboration and support (if your teacher allows of course).
It's funny that this is brought but, because I always had the stereotype of neatness in student's work, until we worked with the samples in class.
I love the way that my classroom teacher assesses the students writing. She always stress not worry about spelling, just their ideas. The children are able to get all of there ideas down and not worry about the 'little' things. I think that more teachers need to focus on the writng and what that consists of, rather than the speliing or neatness.
I think that all of us learned from your post, and will not over look a paper because it is messy, but look for the aspects of great writing.
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