Adventures in Lucy Calkins' Units of Study

This summer my major purchase for personal professional development was Lucy Calkins' Units of Study in Writing.  I spent a delightful summer with Lucy.  Reading her book was like having a conversation with a great mentor teacher.  Many people comment that her ten-plus page lesson plans are a nightmare to get through.  I would agree with that, but just because the lesson plans are this long doesn't mean you have to do all of it.  I would much rather have much more than I need than have to make up my own stuff.  Most of my lessons to my students end up being "distilled essence of Lucy" rather than a verbatim recitation of her lessons. 
Today's lesson was definitely one of those essence ones.  The lesson was about making characters come alive by describing both their internal and external traits.  To liven things up a bit, I introduced my students to one of my favorite music videos on You Tube:  Julian Smith's Reading a Book.  In it, the singer acts all tough and mean when people interrupt him while reading.  His tough exterior is totally at odds with his zest for reading.   The kids got the juxtaposition between internal and external traits immediately. It was a fun introduction to the lesson and I saw several students who tried the technique, including one of my most reluctant writers.

One of the biggest frustrations I have teaching Writing is that students seem to so very rarely take the advice we given them in our lessons.  It's absolutely unheard of in a Math class for students not to follow the algorithm the teacher provides, yet in Writing "doing your own thing" is rampant.  Today I tried to combat that by, at the end of Writing, having each child get out a highlighter.  They traded daybooks with a partner and highlighted evidence of today's lesson on character traits (if they could find it).  Overall the class was very honest in their highlighting and this gave me a quick way to judge what students could still use some help in this area.

Learning to Write By Writing

     I was spending my Sunday afternoon on Teacher's Pay Teachers looking for resources to teach comma placement in sentences.  I have to admit I dread teaching isolated skills like this.  I know I need to because it is part of our standards.  My students will be tested on it and their results will determine if I keep my job.  But stopping creative writing in order to fill in a bunch of worksheets just seems like a step in the wrong direction.  Because of interventions for all students in Reading and Math, we have only had thirty minutes for Writing for the past several years.  In that time we have to fit in Spelling and grammar, as well as creative writing.
     As I was looking through the PowerPoints, task cards, games, and endless worksheets created by my hard-working peers, I couldn't help but remember how much fun my students had writing similes and metaphors to dazzling pictures of beautiful butterflies and weird-looking caterpillars (see previous post.)  I kept asking myself: How can I make a skill like commas more meaningful to my students and keep them writing?
     Then, suddenly, it hit me:  teach writing by writing. I quickly dug out my Common Core standards and looked at what comma rules my students are expected to know. Then I thought of ways students could do authentic writing while still practicing what they need for the standards.  Surprisingly, I found I could do both at the same time, if I was creative.  For example, my students need to know how to use commas to separate nouns in a series (Jeff took an apple, chips, and a sandwich for lunch to work.)  I decided to have the students brainstorm a list of potential Halloween costumes, such as a princess, Luke Skywalker, or The Hulk. I used Halloween because it is topical and interesting to the students.  Then they had to write a sentence for each costume idea, listing at least three things they would need to complete that costume.  For example:
To be a princess for Halloween, I would need a tiara, sparkly high heels, and a long pink dress.
Need to practice commas to set off a list of adjectives?  The Halloween costume idea still works:
My princess costume is sparkly, girly, and beautiful.
Halloween ideas also work for commas after interjections.  I projected a list of fun interjections from http://www.english-grammar-revolution.com/list-of-interjections.html.  The kids were raring to go and couldn't wait to share their sentences.
    I hope my post gets you thinking about how you can ditch the worksheets and get kids to practice those grammar skills by actually writing something memorable.

Me on the Web:

former class website:  www://4mrsjones.110mb.com

current class website:  www.4mrsjones.weebly.com

podcasts:  http://frommrsjones.podbean.com

You Tube channel:  mrsc4jones

Pinterest:  http://pinterest.com/c4jones 

Differentiated Language Arts and Math

One of my goals this year is to use more pre-tests to inform my instruction.  My first experience with this was in Language Arts.
As a fifth grade team, we identified vocabulary skills as a weakness in our students.  Part of that is knowing how to use a dictionary.  The first day of school, I gave my students a pre-test on the skills of using a dictionary to define multiple meaning words, using a pronunciation key, putting words in alphabetical order (to the third letter), and using guide words.  Using their scores, I created a personalized packet for each student with just the skills they needed.  Two students demonstrated mastery in the pre-test, so they had challenging activities which they completed as a team.

 

Three students did very poorly, so they worked with an aide in a small group on slightly easier skills.  

The rest of the class participated in a mini-lesson each day on a different skill, then worked independently on their packets.  

Today I gave the post-test and 90% of the class passed.  Go kids!
My second experience with pre-tests was did not go as smoothly.  I pre-tested my Math class for the first unit.  Most of the material should have been review, but clearly it wasn't.  So I greatly reduced the scope of the unit, since I had only alloted two weeks for it.  My original plans were to teach factors, multiples, arrays, prime, and composite numbers, prime factoring, multiplication properties, and divisibility rules.  I decided to stick with factors, multiples, primes and composites.  We spend a week on factors alone because it was so difficult for them.  We did many activities:  Venn diagrams, foldables with examples and rules, games from our Math series, and traditional worksheets.  We even color-coded a hundreds chart with colors that represented the different multiples.  Students were allowed to use their interactive Math notebooks, their student reference book, or the definition wall during the test.  
Despite all of this, many students failed the test.  When I thought about why I had two very different outcomes, I came to the conclusion that my Language Arts students corrected their own pre-test.  They knew what they needed to work on.  I also used differentiated instruction with my Language Arts class where I didn't do as much of that with the Math class.
For the Unit 2 pre-test, I came across a site called Mastery Connect.  Mastery Connect is a site that links Common Core assessments in Reading and Math and tracks student progress.  The basic service is free.  I couldn't find an assessment that really matched the skills I will teach in Unit 2, so I made one and posted it to the site.  It was easy to add the scores to my "tracker" and visually track what skills students have and need.