Report Writing

Our first main piece of writing is almost completed and will be sent home shortly (for most people, via email). I will also be sending home the initial baseline writing sample so you can compare the two and note the progress.

This first piece of writing is our reports on Chris Simon's visit to our class at the end of September.

We have been approaching this as both a modeled and shared writing task. In other words, we are building it sentence by sentence with direct guidance and input from me and with student suggestions.

One of main priorities in this task is to 'add more beef to the hamburger' by including as much specific details as possible about the who/when/where/what/why and how. We are also 'spicing' up the hamburger by including a variety of sentences (question, statement, exclamation). Our organization should also be greatly improved through the use of specific transition words to organize the paragraphs.

There is, of course, still autonomy to the task: students are choosing what type of question to use as their opening, how they want to write the when/where/who/why/how, which transition words, which questions/answers from the interview and interesting facts to put in the 'what' section, where they want to put their exclamation points.

I am merely breaking it down into specific, smaller tasks, and providing examples and resources (such as transition word lists and spelling lists).

I am expecting through this task that the writing they produce should be significantly improved than their initial baseline piece. My expectations will increase (and increase more for the Gr. 8's vs. the Gr. 7's).

The next report (on Luke Navarro's interview in November) will be more independent, a chance for me to see if they can apply these skills on their own.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

COMING UP NEXT! Writing game reviews, a report on our interview with Luke Navarro...and then main idea paragraphs which will turn into essays in the Winter time as we study Romeo & Juliette!

Also coming up very soon...spelling the top most mis-spelled words!