Today our goals were to look at:
- planning instruction based on assessment results
- powerful lesson sequnces
- utilizing the writing process in the classroom
Here’s what we did to work toward meeting those goals:
Brainwarming
Just as athletes get warm up their bodies before game play or practice, writers need to warm up their brains. To this end, we worked through a Brainwarming activity designed by Julie Ferguson of Beacon Literary Services. As a part of the Hillcrest Middle School staff, I took a workshop with her earlier this year, enjoyed it, and I thought I’d pass along what I’d learned about improving the quality and quantity of the writing students do.
Here’s are some of the key pieces in Brainwarming:
- Your favourite word
- Power Words
- Power Triplets
- A 5-Winute Write
- Writing quickly
- Harnessing the power of the creative right brain
- Supporting the diversity of learners – from Gifted to LD – in your classroom
The PowerPoint below is the one I used in class to guide you through the exercise. You can find more info at Julie’s website, if you are interested:
A few of these athletes could have used a better warm up, I reckon:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF9hM6c5-Qg[/youtube]
Planning Instruction Based on Assessment Results
Once we were warmed up, we engaged in some writing of our own. The writing tasks related to a mini-lesson I’d used with Grade 8s to improve their skills of persuasion, namely their ability to create powerful rebuttal. I hoped to model the ideas that:
- mini-lessons to improve student writing need not be pre-packaged but, instead, you will achieve very good results by designing your own lessons tailored to the exact concerns you see in the student writing itself.
- although the end goal was to improve student writing, the means to that end was via speaking and listening activities. Hopefully, even reluctant writers can and will engage with the concepts under study if they find oral presentations more to their liking than just writing.
We lesson sequence went as follows:
A/B Partners
To get you in a persuasive mood we used A/B partners to consider the topic: The Winter Olympics will be good for British Columbia. The A partner took the Pro side and the B partner was the Con. After 10 seconds of think time, the As spoke and then the Bs had the floor (after 10 seconds of think time, of course). To summarize, one convincing A and one persuasive B took the stage and tried to convince their classmates of their position.
Making Arguments Weak Mini-Lesson
After the warm up, we played with the idea of rebuttal and crafted refutation for a series of arguments. We had one group who had prepared a rebuttal for the same argument Face Off against another but abandoned other challenges due to time constraints.
Here’s the handout we used for the mini-lesson:
Making Arguments Weak Handout & Using Gestures in Speeches
This week’s readings – Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of the Student Diversity text – have many more ideas on how you can craft mini-lessons to meet the academic needs of your students. This classes work and the readings should help you as you complete your In-Class Writing Assessment task that’s due on Wednesday, 4 March. More to the point, they should help you on your long practicum as you aim to meet the needs of the learners in your classroom.
The Writing Process
I struggled with the idea of how to present an interactive lesson on entire writing process in just over an hour. In the end, I settled on a lesson that involved the writing of haiku poetry, a form often used in middle school poetry classes. After a quick overview of A Writing Process (as envisioned by writing teacher Diana Cruchley. I took a workshop from her 2 years ago) –
– we engaged in a variety of pre-writing activities. The activities were:
Modeling
We looked over a dozen haiku, determined our favourite, and developed a list of key features for haiku poetry. Here’s the list of poems we looked at:
I also shared a few of my favourite Redneck Haiku. They can be found here. If you’re yearning for more, check out these Zombie Haiku:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd1Ws9QnmZY&feature=PlayList&p=332A297059FDF20E&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=9[/youtube]
or Biff from the Back to the Future Trilogy with some funny haiku songs:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwnqUmmJ-zE[/youtube]
The haiku criteria we developed are as follows:
Haiku poems…
- Are short
Typically 3 short lines with a maximum of 17 syllables. They may follow a 5-7-5 pattern but need not. Here’s a one line haiku by Lee Gurga:
trying the old pump a mouse pours out
- Have a Twist (Internal Comparison / Juxtaposition)
Most haiku have two images, one on either side of a break in the poem.
- Have a “Haiku” moment in time
They capture moments of epiphany or discoveries about the world and our place in it. To best capture the immediacy of the moment, haikus are generally written in the present tense and benefit from an economy of language.
- Focus on nature, including human nature, shown concretely
Haiku avoid figurative language (similes, metaphors, personfication and the like) in favour of direct and specific descriptions of the world around us.
- Are 5 senses specific
Powerful haikus are based on vivid imagery based on the five senses.
In an effort to make those criteria as clear as possible, we engaged in a variety of short writing tasks:
Word Seasons (handout: Word Seasons Word List)
I showed a list of words and asked you to associate each one with a season.
Sandwich Poems (handout: Sandwich Poems Examples)
These are three-line poems in which the first two lines and the second two lines form a different compound word. Here’s an example:
fire
alarm
clock
Image Pools
I gave out the first line of a haiku:
Halloween night —
then asked you to visualize your most memorable Halloween night and share a few images to create a class image pool. After that, you generated a haiku of your own. Here are the first drafts that were written on the board:
Halloween night –
Hands clenching
Crowds fading away
Halloween night —
Sixteen graves to go
Ladies wrapped in skins of the dead
Kurt’s halloween night –
A homemade pumpkin costume
Top looks like penis
We ran out of time for the scheduled nature walk aimed at gathering information for a haiku. So, your homework for next class is as follows:
- Go on a nature walk
- Gather 5 sense information on the back of your Sample Haiku handout
- Write 3 haikus that fit with the key features of haiku that we explored in class
- Bring your 3 haikus to class on Thursday, 4 February 2010.
The haiku activities we worked with in today’s class come from a book called Wordplaygrounds by John S. O’Connor. Here’s Connor’s ideas on writing haiku:
Same Pond, New Splash: Writing Modern English Haiku
See you on Tuesday at Authorfest. Please remenber that our regularly scheduled class is cancelled so you can attend the Authorfest event. Here’s the flyer with all the details:
For more info on the event and general info on how to bring authors into your classroom, please click on the Authorfest link.
Cheers,
– Lawrence
