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.