Official Blog Post #3--Writing our first essay, woohoo

I really am not sure what to write about today.  I am so glad to have the KPTP behind me now and while I am anxious about how I have done, I am just going to put it behind me and move on, placing more focus on working on some of the details that I need to focus on in my classroom.

Something we started on today in my classroom was a writing assignment where I am going to ask students to provide a definition for freedom.  This is a slight twist on what is required for the pacing guide, which expected students to do a persuasive speech “declaring which freedom(s) are essential”.  Instead of going with the speech idea, I am instead turning it into a four paragraph essay (which I will also have them read out loud, even if it’s in small groups or to a partner).

One of the things that I’m dreading about this writing assignment (and that they are too) is the fact that the longest thing these students have been required to write so far this year in our class is a well-developed paragraph, which they had been provided a template and sentence starters with, so they are all showing a lot of resistance to the idea of writing an essay, although I am doing what I can to make it as structured as possible.  I want to prepare them with at least one more-extensive writing assignment before they move into high school.

Even though I personally do not take well to most pre-writing strategies, we started with a concept map yesterday about freedom and how it can be seen in the protagonists of the texts we have read as a class and also in their own lives.  This was something I used to help develop students’ background knowledge and get them thinking about the topic, which has been the main theme of this entire unit.  Certain students even showed me that they had taken a whole lot more out of the units than I had realized, especially when one of my “challenging” students spent a portion of class explaining themes of a text to a student who had missed the entire week we had gone over it.

So, my big challenge now is going to be keeping students interested in a 4-paragraph writing assignment when the most they’ve written is one.  I plan on breaking up the writing assignment with fun, smaller activities from time to time.  Yesterday, I started out with a writing assignment another student teaching candidate (Mr. Thimesch) had suggested, which was to have students write “the most bogus excuse you can that you do not have your homework today.”  Even though a few students really enjoyed it and even took it home to add more to it, many of them simply provided me with one or two sentences of clichés, no matter how much I prodded.  My CT has warned me that a longer writing project was going to be a challenge with them, but this has made me realize just how much of a challenge it is going to be, because this was even a “fun” assignment.

My CT has given me some forewarning that this is going to be the most challenging thing I’ve done with them so far, and really approves of the structure I intend to use for the different stages of the essay (that horrible, scary word that leaves students quaking) such as using graphic designers for my CwC and my other class with lower-level students.  Overall though, I feel like this is something that the students just need to get used to; in middle school, I can take them by the hand and help them through an assignment, but in high school they are going to be thrown to the sharks, so to speak.

Another detail I want to add is that I am trying to develop more of a writing community with my students in the classroom. I tried to give them a lot of low pressure, low point value writing opportunities but a lot of them have been turned off of writing by previous experiences, even telling me that fun and writing can not go together