April assignment

The area on which I decided to focus my inquiry is methods I can use to help my EL students become better writers using oral language.

This is important to me because we have a large EL population at my school, and the common trend for our students is to learn listening and speaking skills earlier than reading and writing skills. While this is a natural sequence some students never bring reading and writing up to the fluent level. This leaves them ill equipped to participate in the academic language required for middle and high school.

The context in which I teach is a Title 1, public school in program improvement. Our English population is about 135 students, 33% of the school, two thirds of which are Spanish speaking. I teach small RTI groups. For this study I have focused on a group of 5th grade students who scored Intermediate in writing on the 2010 CELDT.

The data I have collected is writing samples, oral recordings and student surveys.

As a result of my inquiry I have realized that the most motivating factor for my students is their own success. I am organizing the lesson material into very small discrete units that students can practice and master. Another improvement is increased emphasis on practicing oral language in class before writing. There is no such thing as too much talking. We use sentence frames for almost everything and practice them aloud repeatedly with variations before writing.

As a result of my inquiry I have observed the following changes in my focal students.
1. increased understanding and use of sentence structure
2. increased editing and revising skills.

making learning visible

My inquiry has shifted to how can I show these students their learning in a meaningful way?

Using a recorded survey back in January I found that:

• They all know that our purpose is to improve their written English.
• They all have learned our 5 point sentence rubric.
• They all appreciated the small group support to work on editing their writing
• None of them remember taking the CELDT test and have little or no understanding of
what it is and why they take it.
• Most of them couldn’t define a sentence.

We’ve spent months on sentence writing but I’ve neglected to teach them the meaning of the word or concept of a sentence. And they also need to really understand the difference between a simple and complex sentence. The CELDT rubric requires a complex sentence to get the highest score. A simple grammatically correct sentence is still only a 2 on a 0-3 rubric.

So since then we have spent more time understanding what we’re doing. We’ve written simple sentences and transformed them into complex ones. We have a growing chart of ways we know to write complex sentences. It maybe time to do another survey and see if I’ve really taught what a sentence is. I’ve had individual conferences with each one going over their CELDT scores.

My small team members have given me several good ideas to make the learning visible and concrete. We have added another row of boxes on the writing rubric so that each student can score their own writing and then compare their score to mine.

writing about science

Working with science content to teach writing is proving to be challenging. It takes more time both in my preparation and in teaching the class. I check in with the science teacher to learn the weekly content of the 5th grade science class and then plan the appropriate language structures to match the science lesson. On Monday I front load the weekly science content information to the students, focusing on new vocabulary. On Tuesday I teach language structures using everyday vocabulary to practice the new forms. On Wednesday we write the language structures with the science vocabulary. On Thursday we edit and rework our writing or practice with language games. I find I’m spending more time teaching and reviewing the science than teaching writing.

12/6

My inquiry question, today, is how can I motivate these kids to care about learning to write in English? My latest attempt is using their science curriculum as our content. Many of them are much more engaged in conversations about real things than literature.

The learning goal for my students is to be able to write grammatically correct English sentences.

The indicator that this goal has been reached will be when they can score a 3 or 4 on the CELDT sentence, writing rubric. They will use our five-point sentence rubric to self edit and revise their writing.

My focal students are Hector, Rinzen, and Maricela.

The data sources that will be collected are sentences written in class using the five-point rubric, CELDT like sentence writing samples, and their mechanics scores on the regular district, writing assessments.

Thoughts from our last meeting 11/15/10

At this moment in time my question is:
How can I teach these 7 kids (one new student) to write standard English sentences?

Being as specific as I can be right now, I want them to be able to write a grammatically sound sentence on any given topic. And yes, I want them to score a 3 or 4 on the CELDT sentence writing rubric. Yes that maybe teaching to the test. Ugh, but that’s my mandate for this group. This RTI group was formed because they are all 5th graders and scoring a three or below on the writing portion of the CELDT test. and it’s my goal for them.

I could find out what they’re learning if I was to collect their writing in this small group everyday. I might also look at their writer’s workshop writing periodically to see if there is any transfer of skills.

But now we need some content to work with. Something that will engage a varyied group of students. Motivation? What do they care about?

I’m so happy to have this group of minds helping me. How can I focus this class for learning to write is my question now? What structure can I hang this on? Teaching from literature has not been successful so far. At least half of them literally start yawning when I read aloud to them. I may just need to work harder on book choice, but maybe there are other possibilities. One idea is using a language experience approach where we do something together weekly or for five minutes at the start of each lesson. I don’t know enough about what motivates these kids. I hardly know them. What are their strengths?

Also we discussed sentence frames. Could I teach sentence structure by choosing 5 sentence frames and using them all year. One for description, one for sequencing, comparison, and so on.

These kids control a lot

Given a simple 4-picture narrative, illustration, these students had much to say in their writing. They all understood the assignment, and wrote on topic. Some were able to add details enhancing their version of the story. Most of them used advanced, relevant vocabulary such as searched, project, librarian, and assignment. In conclusion all 6 students had control over many aspects of the writing process.

The places where more work is needed are in the mechanics of writing. They all wrote one long run-on sentence and made many mistakes in spelling and grammar.

Oh, right, what do they control now?

Hi Claire,
Oh, yes, how Marie Clay of you.
What do they control now???
Thanks, I needed that input.
They do control a lot. I will look again and post more.