Mini-project

The 8th grade students in my co-teach class just finished reading The Outsiders.  I had never read it before and fell in love with it as I read it with my class.  However, we are in countdown to TCAP mode, so my co-teacher and I needed to hit as many birds as we could with the one stone we were holding.  Literature was the area we scored the lowest on per the latest assessment, so I thought about the way Penny Kittle weaved writing and reading together in her class.  I looked back in her book, Write Beside Them, for some strategies to put into place.  I determined what I needed to focus on and decided to implement quick writes to help accomplish the goal.
I looked at the learning objectives and created topics to satisfy the requirements.  This is how I organized the quick writes:
     
        Sub-category                  Quick write prompt

Strategies that work from ICL7304

I wanted to share a couple strategies I've gained from this class and used successfully.  The first is the "three stars and a wish".  This is such a simple way to have students provide feedback, and I didn't even have to pull any teeth to get them to participate fully!  The second is the "music in my heart" activity I learned from Kittle's book.  I did this activity in one class period, and learned that next time I will break it down into three days of mini-lessons.  The first day, I will have students create a list of approximately 10 songs that trigger an emotion for them.  The second day, I will have them draw their heart and fill it with the song titles and illustrations that go along with them.  The third day, I will have them write the story of a memory related to one of the songs in the heart.  Doing all of this in on class period with my 8th graders in a co-teach setting was difficult, but the students really had fun with it.  I think splitting it up would provide students more time to focus on the writing part of it.  Above is a picture of one of my student's hearts from class.

What has worked for me...

When it comes to teaching writing, I am far from polished.  I have implemented many different strategies along this road; some successful, some not so much.  My English co-teacher uses the Daily Grammar Practice program as bell work each day, and this is helping students demonstrate understanding of how sentences work.  As far as actually getting students to write, I have used the Storybird tool and the kids really enjoyed the freedom and creativity it offers.  I also purchased Study Island as a TCAP study tool, and this program has a writing prompt section that allows students to type his or her essays and submit them to the teacher for us to review, provide feedback, and return to them for revision.  The kids enjoyed doing this a little more than writing essays by hand, and hopefully we are moving towards taking the test on computers in the near future.  I always try to give students interesting topics, but unfortunately what I find fun does not equate to the same for all students. I arm my students with writing folders to make sure students are well equipped for the writing process.  The folders contain lists of categorized adjectives to add to writing as well as examples of figurative language. The folders take students from writing descriptive sentences, to paragraphs, and then to essays.  They keep all of their work in the folders and can track their own progress.   These have been helpful, but I continue to work on giving more frequent feedback.