My afternoon is not setup ideally. In an ideal world I'd have 5 consecutive days where I have a 2:00-3:00 block of time, or something close to it. Instead I have 3 days/wk, with my Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays being my writing days. On Tuesday I have a specialist at 2:30, and on Wednesdays we have district-wide early dismissal at 1:30 for staff development. I love the latter, because it allows for collaboration and time to get things done (time as a whole!). The former is simply a necessity, as that is when we could fit it in.
What is the point of explaining that? Well, because I am pushing onward with a new unit of study in writing. We are going to work on crafting essays. Thus far it hasn't been the most successful endeavor. Much of this is related back to my instruction. I jumped too far ahead from the start, prompting them to use the small things they notice as essay starters. That is fine, but you need to give them a scaffold:
small things---> larger generalizations.
How am I changing? We are going to move forward, and eventually circle back to the small things. We'll use a prompt as a starter "I learn many new things are school." From there we'll be practicing using elaborating phrases like "for example; this connects with; In addition; this makes me realize...". After modelling, and guided practice, we'll move onward to taking some of our ideas further with these phrases. I'll also point out some of the different ideas that can be used, and those that are being used by our class.
Then later in the week we'll go back and look at some of our ideas to see if there bigger ideas inside. We'll also use some other strategies to generate essay ideas- conversational starters etc. The end going being that we'll start working on the structural elements (thesis, big ideas, examples/supporting details). The hope is that this allows them to extend thinking on ideas further, and construct arguments related to big concepts. Right now it is a work in progress.
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