Consolidating and Reflecting: Tools for Take-off

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Don’t limit your students’ capacity to write, with your capacity to read. ~ Elaine Weber

Welcome:

Give 1 - Get 1 Activity: How do you use writing in your content area?
- Give One Get One Activity.docx

Reasons to Write
- Reasons to Write Podcast: Reasons to Write.mp3
- Reasons to Write posters/dialogue board questions/quickwrites: Reasons to Write Journal Response.doc

Writing to Learn:

What is Writing to Learn?

Generally, writing-to-learn activities are short, impromptu or otherwise informal writing tasks that help students think through key concepts or ideas presented in a course. Often, these writing tasks are limited to less than five minutes of class time or are assigned as brief, out-of-class assignments.

Writing in the content area helps students:

organize and clarify thoughts
find out what they know and don't know
make personal connections to the content
generate new ideas, thoughts and observations
hypothesize without fear of being wrong
reflect on their own thought processes
summarize what they have learned
open a channel of communication with others

Writing in the content area helps teachers:

assess prior and subsequent knowledge
assess how students organize and express their ideas
communicate with students one-on-one
provide individual learning supports that allow students to develop writing to learn skills

Some Examples:

Dialogue Board/Blog
Quickwrites/Journals
Ink Share
Tear & Share

Dialogue Boards:

Dialogue Boards are assessment focuses on students interacting with the prompt and /or each other. It can be used:

as an on-going gathering activity
to activate pror knowledge and experience
for dialogue between students based on opinion statements
as a reflection on learning
to assess what student know about a topic
to make a connection to the theme of the unit

Quickwrites:

Quickwrites are a form of impromptu writing in which the students responds to a stimulus. The stimulus can be a literary piece, content article, experiment, problem, or scenario. Their purpose is to help students quickly put ideas, understandings, and learnings on paper.

Journal Quickwrites:

Cognitive Activities in Journal Entries (things to put in your journals)

Observations: describing what is visible, summarizing, and interpreting details, or recalling key ideas.
Questioning: formulating and recording personal doubts, academic queries, validity of information, and theory.
Speculation: free to wonder about the meaning of events, issues, facts, readings, interpretations, problems, and solutions.
Self-Awareness: become conscious about what they stand for and how they are different from others.
Digression: departs from the subject to connect to something that "comes to mind."
Synthesis: Organize ideas and find relations and connections between topics.

Activity: ANTARTICA photo response.ppt -

view critically from a content-specific viewpoint (ex: mathematician, sociologist, historian, author, scientist, explorer, etc.)

Ink Share and Tear & Share

Ink Share is an activitiy that students write their thoughts about a topic, then share their ideas with three other students. Students love this activity.

Tear and Share is a great activity helps students express and write their thoughts about a piece of text that they have read.

Other ways to Utilize Writing to Improve Learning

Comprehension Collection/Site of Content Area Writing Strategies:

http://web000.greece.k12.ny.us/instruction/ela/6-12/Tools/Index.htm

Learning to Write

Scaffolding Writing
Models for "switching" activity --
- Math Graphing http://www.eduplace.com/math/mathsteps/4/c/
- Weather: http://www.econet.org.uk/weather/whatis.html
Ways to expand student writing
- Elaborating and Improving Writing in the Content Area.doc

6 Traits in the Content Area
- What are the 6 Traits? http://www.edina.k12.mn.us/concord/teacherlinks/sixtraits/sixtraits.html
  - Ideas and Content: What content information should be in the piece? Does the student grasp the meaning of the text/information/topic?
  - Organization: Does the information flow in a logical manner that fits the text and purpose for writing?
  - Voice: How does the piece "sound"? Is it written from the voice of a scientist? a mathematician?
  - Word Choice: Are content specific words USED in the writing? (ps -- you may want to "word wall" them :)
  - Sentence Fluency: Does the construction of text fit the type of writing expected? (labs sound different than paragraphs)
  - Conventions: Does the student's usage of grammer, punctuation, capitalization and word usage negatively or positively impact the piece?
  - Presentation: Is the final product what was expected?