Saturday, April 28, 2012

Actual Revision!

The joy and ease of Kelly Gallagher strikes again.

I'm not sure why it happened but my CFL essays are actually being revised by the students! Up until now I was at a loss how to get my third graders to stop feeling such an attachment to their first drafts. They might look back over their papers and add a period or a capital letter, but rarely would they ever change any wording. This week was different.

It was week two with using mentor texts. I had modeled revision for the students, making sure to let them hear my thinking. Two students were quick to finish and hand in their essays. I thanked them for their lousy drafts, reminding them that all drafts are lousy, and handed the drafts back to them with the instructions to read the drafts out loud to each other. I handed student A student B's draft and student B student A's. The students looked at me, looked at their drafts, and went off to read to each other.

I positioned myself in the room so that I could spy on the students. In the past, these peer revision sessions mostly resulted in comments like, "This is good" or "You need a capital letter here." This time I heard one student say, "I see here (student pointed at paper) you stated your claim. You forgot to use a comma with your three main reasons." I was so excited! The students were using the conversation from the mapping exercises to discuss their papers. Even better, one of the students came up to me and asked, "Can I start over on a fresh sheet of paper? This middle part doesn't make sense."

So far this week I have had all but 4 students complete their drafts. Of those students, two are in the process of typing their third and fourth drafts and two are hand writing their second drafts. Out of 22 papers turned in to me, I have had 6 students with significant changes to their original drafts. All six of those students had more that 3 drafts before they turned in a final paper to me.

Here are some final papers turned in by my students. They were given the option to type or hand write their papers. Unfortunately, it was mostly the students with nice handwriting that chose to type.

The first and the last paragraphs were written after using the mapping technique with mentor texts. The middle paragraph was premapping. Notice how jumbled her message is in the middle paragraph. She mainly copied notes straight from her daybook.

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Mentored and Mentoring

This past Monday, I was excited to get a chance to leave my classroom and the annual pressure leading up to End of Grade tests and go to UNCC's Writing Project's Spring Conference. Kelly Gallagher was the key note speaker and is now my new go to writing guru.

My grade level has been working on using the Common Core standards to teach and assess argumentative writing. Our classes had been studying the differences between compact fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs for almost two months. Students had listened to speakers, created a 3 word essay, read articles, created comparison charts, read Venn Diagrams, analyzed charts, gone over rubrics for what a good argumentative essay contains, and been given a checklist to keep in their draft books. Yet, they still complained they didn't know what to write.

Kelly Gallagher’s maps were the missing piece. I was giving students lots of factual texts but nothing for them to use as a mentor to guide their writing. When I did show them an argumentative essay, I didn't teach them how to use it to create their own writing piece.

On Tuesday I went in early to work and began rewriting my writing lesson plans for the week. I found wonderful mentor texts at Write Source.


http://www.thewritesource.com/studentmodels/

I gave the students a printed copy of an introductory paragraph and a conclusion paragraph. After a discussion about the purpose of a mentor text, we began "mapping" the introductory paragraph. Students watched as I used the mentor text and the map to write my own introductory paragraph.


My Mapping with the Students
Finally the students had a chance to try. It was amazing. For the first time ever, not a single child asked to go the bathroom or got out of their seat to grab a pencil. They immediately began writing. The same students that the Friday before couldn't seem to get more than one sentence written in 45 minutes were itching to write. I had freed them from the unknown. They had plenty to say and now they knew how to say it!



Mapping and Second Draft

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