I was having trouble with tracking students progress with their writings. I looked for some ideas on TpT, but couldn't find anything that fit exactly what I needed so I decided to create my own writing clip chart. This chart has been working GREAT! Students check in with me every time they are ready to clip down to the next step and I am able to easily see where students are with their writing. I also like how organized the students have become with their writing now that I have started using the clip chart. I have seen great progress from before the clip chart to now! How the clip chart works: Students must first fill out a Thinking Map to organize their thoughts and plan their writing. Then students begin their rough draft. For this draft I am not worried about spelling or punctuation (they can fix that later). For this section I am mostly interested in their writing making sense and following their Thinking Maps. Next students will check their own work using a colored pen. They have checklists they use for the different writing themes we are focusing on each week, as well as themes we have discussed in past weeks. Once students have checked their own work, they have a partner check their work. This is when students are making sure their writing makes sense and that they have no spelling or punctuation errors. After they have their peer review, students may begin their final draft. Each student re-writes their piece with their best hand writing and with all of the corrections fixed in their paper. Finally the student turns in their final draft where the teacher reads, corrects and conferences with the student. I have created a sheet to record things that were good about the students' writing, as well as goals for their future writings. This clip chart has been working great and I really like the structure it gives the students when writing!! All parts of the writing clip chart are attached below! Feel free to download & use! :)
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Today for our grammar review we played a game. I am currently teaching summer school so most of the topics we cover are review. While the students seemed to be doing fine with nouns, they were struggling with the types of sentences (Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative and Exclamatory) as well as Relative Pronouns (Who, Whom, Whose, Which and That). I decided it was time for an intervention and some fun!
To review these topics I broke students up into groups with various levels of understanding within each group. I then gave each group member a sheet of colored paper to create the blue team, the green team and the yellow team (you could always have more!) All of the student sat in a circle around a bucket in the middle of the circle. Then came the review! I began asking various questions to the whole class: "What type of sentence is this: Go walk the dog!" "What do you put at the end of an interrogative sentence?" "List 3 proper nouns" "Write a sentence with 2 common nouns" "What does a pronoun replace?" "What are the 5 relative pronouns we have been discussing?" And the overall review question: "Write a declarative sentence that has at least 1 noun and 1 pronoun. After each question, students would turn to their group to discuss their thoughts and ideas about the answer. Once each student had talked with their group, they wrote their answer on their colored piece of paper and shot their piece of paper into the basket in the middle. This became a competition and students couldn't wait to answer so they could throw their piece of paper into the bucket. When normally you ask a question and you get a couple students raising their hands to participate, I now had all students in my class participating and being brave, answering questions even if they weren't sure if their answer was correct!! After all students have shot their papers, the ones that made it into the basket were pulled and read out loud to the class. We could tell what team the paper came from because of the color. If student's answers were correct, their team got a point; if student's answers were incorrect, we discussed, as a class why and their team did not receive a point. The students seemed to really enjoy this activity! I was able to see some great collaboration and team work as well as hear discussions about the topics to assess where students thinking was. This activity is so easy to modify and the students were so engaged! I will definitely be doing this activity again! Then came the review! I began asking various questions to the whole class |
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