Writing Test

Yay it is finally Friday!! I am so glad it is time for the weekend. I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend! Although since it is Friday it is time for Friend or Foe Friday! I wanted to focus on writing test and wanted to find out if these test are your friend or foe?
We have discussed writing prompts in past blogs and about how many papers our students write. All those paper are mainly preparing them for these big writing test. I mean don't get me wrong it is important that our students learn how to write a paper. They will use this skill throughout their life but preparing them for the test is definitely the short term goal for teachers. We need to prepare them for all types of paper and help them understand all types of prompts. We are teaching them how to write a successful paper but we are thinking about what they will need to know to write a successful paper on the test.
What do you think about these test? Are they your friend of foe? Do you think they help you by showing how your students did on the test? Does it help you strive to teach them better or worry you that you aren't teaching them enough?
~Manda

Fish Bowling

Is writing a friend or foe in your classroom? Here we're suppose to "write across the curriculum", but I mean in actual writing classes. Do you use a writer's workshop format? Student teaching and subbing I have loved fish bowling. It gets hard to read 20-30+ rough papers 3-5+ times. If you have never done fish bowling, when your students have completed their rough draft, you place them in groups of 4-6. The first time you do it with your class, you should should guide each group through it. Once they understand it you can place the groups together (different or same groups) and only work with 1-2 and let your stronger students run the group themselves.

Once the group is formed, everyone will take turns reading aloud their writings. You can choose to have your students read their own writing or to have them swap papers and read a classmate's paper. When they swap and have to read it aloud the classmate reading it tends to catch spelling and grammatical errors. It's completely up to you though. After each paper has been read, students go around the circle and comment on something they liked about the paper. Then they go back around the circle and comment on something they think could be improved. We call these our "stars" and our "wishes".

I really love this format because each student gets a lot of feedback from their peers and it really doesn't take a long time to do it.

So tell us, is writing a friend or foe? Have you ever fish bowled? Or what do you do?

~Steph

Writing Topics

Time for another Friend or Foe Friday. At this point in the year most teachers and students are probably feeling sick about writing another essay. We have had students write paper after paper on topic after topic. Anyone running out of good ideas for topics?

Teachers always have a few writing topics that they use year after year. Those writing topics that all your students enjoy writing about. This week I want to focus on those kind of topics. This way we can help turn those end of the year writing topics into your friend and not your foe.

I want to talk about my favorite writing topic from student teaching. We used this topic when introducing persuasive writing. In this paper students have to persuade a monster not to eat them. This topic really brought out the creativity in my students and they enjoyed writing it.
We introduced this topic with a fake news cast about a people eating monster on the loose and even showed a picture of a monster to the students. We then told the students that they were to pretend the monster came to our school and caught them. They would then write a paper about what they would say to the monster to persuasive them to not eat them. My students wrote about things like being to skinny or having a illness. I even had students trying to persuade the monster to eat the rest of the class instead. It was a fun topic that all my students loved sharing. My supervising teacher even baked a monster shaped cake at the end of the week and the students got to eat the monster instead of it eating them. It was so much fun and the students loved it.

Your turn! Tell me about some of your favorite writing topics

~Manda

Figurative Language

Time for Friend of Foe Friday! This weeks topic is figurative language. Is this your friend or foe when it comes to teaching it in a classroom full of students? The 5^th grade class that I student taught in last year found it confusing and frustrating. My supervising teacher and I decided to make a figurative language unit that would teach figurative language and poetry but also be fun for the students. We decided to cover different kinds of poetry for two weeks. We chose types of poetry that the students could enjoy and were easy to follow. We would discuss the type of poem and the figurative language that was associated with that type of poetry for a few days. Then the students would write their own poem like the one we talked about. At the end of the two weeks the students would have several types of poems that they had written. Students that worked hard on their poems would be able to participate in a “Poetry Café”. This would be a time for each student to share their poems to the class. We even made a stage and plugged up a microphone. The students really enjoyed sharing their poems as well as hearing the other student’s poems. I found that students understood poetry and figurative language more by writing their own and also by hearing how their classmates used the figurative language in their poems.  

Our focuses during this unit were:

Onomatopoeia – Onomatopoeia Poems

Rhyme Scheme – “My Favorite Things” Poems

Imagery – “Color of Love” Poems

For more information on these activities please view my resources at our TpT store.

           

During this week we also discussed metaphors, similes, refrains, and stanzas. Even though we did not have a poem that focused on these figurative language elements this unit is a great place to discuss these other elements of figurative language. We also used a PowerPoint as the beginning of the unit. We used movie clips, commercials, and song lyrics that the students were familiar with that included different figurative language elements that we would be discussing. A PowerPoint with examples is a great way to introduce these elements to your students. What have you used to introduce these elements? Have you ever done an activity similar to the “Poetry café”? Let us know if figurative language has been your friend or foe?

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~Manda