Formative Assessment Cycle Kick Off!

I'm excited to start this week! 

I am kicking off the first of several days of staff development in my district aligned to our formative writing assessment cycle.  

Starting tomorrow, each grade level K-6 will be attending a full day formative assessment to look at student writing on a skill progression. Teachers have been busy teaching a narrative unit over the past several weeks. In the days ahead, we will have the opportunity to come together with our grade level colleagues district-wide to closely look at authentic student work in narrative writing and learn the assessment tools from Writing Pathways from Lucy Calkins’ A Common Core Workshop Curriculum, Heinemann, 2013.

Here’s how it works…. 

All elementary teachers grades K-6 gave the same narrative writing prompt during the first few days of the school year back in August. Students wrote independently to that prompt for approximately 45 minutes. Then, focused instruction in the narrative unit took place across the next ensuing weeks. Then, teachers gave the same “on-demand” narrative prompt to their students.

We are now meeting in grade level teams, to learn the assessment system, which is comprised of:

~ Learning Progression

~ Rubric 

~ Student Checklist

The learning progressions show how writers progress step-by-step across several grade levels. The learning progression focuses on a writer’s development in three main areas of writing: structure, development and conventions. Using the progression we can study the way a child might move toward increasing sophistication as they practice and learn these areas of writing thru the grades.

The grade level rubric has the same information as the learning progression with a narrower lens focusing on your grade level and the grade level above and below the grade level you teach. Rubrics help you to see where each child is in relation to where the child used to be and where that child could be next. The rubric provides you with a band, of sorts, to help you determine if student’s resembles grade level expectations or those of the grades that bookend first grade. Rubrics can be helpful tools for noting trends across classrooms and grades. They may be shared with parents to raise the level of support they may give their children.

Narrowing the focus even further is the student checklist, which is just the learning progression, isolated at one grade level. The student checklists take the grade level expectations and change them to “I statements” for student use.  Grades K & 1 further differentiates the checklist and provides them in an illustrated format as well as in a text format. These checklists are designed to be used by students to self-assess their progress and set goals and they also serve as useful tools for revision and editing.

These tools help you look at a piece of writing and see ways that piece of writing is a step ahead of yesterday’s work and a step toward tomorrow’s work.

As we look at student samples we’ll frame our lenses with some guiding questions:

1)  What does this student know about narrative, small moment writing?

2)  What does this student know about organization? Does each page have new information or does it seem like the writer just put down the thought w/o a sense of what should go together?

3)  What does this writer say about one idea before veering off to the next?

4)  What about the pictures- do they reveal details?

5)  What about spelling and conventions? What does this writer know about letter sound relationships?

Looking at Student Work:

 When looking at student work the focus will be on the big three: structure, development and conventions.

Key Areas of Focus:

Structure:

• Overall
•  Lead
•  Transitions
•  Ending
•  Organization

Development:

•  Elaboration
• Craft

Language Convention:

•  Spelling
•  Punctuation

These questions and answers can guide us in tailoring the unit ahead and forming small groups as we see fit. As you we this process, we will expect and hopefully embrace differences of opinion. This is evidence of a disconnect in the way we are viewing student work.  Digging into that disconnect will help us align our vision and ourselves.

Rest assured we know there’ll be variation between our student writers and the benchmark pieces from Teacher’s College. (Our students are only in year two of writing workshop instruction, but the growth we have witnessed across the span of the past twelve months is staggering!)

Once the teachers have studied their students’ writing behaviors and determined where their writers fall on the learning progression, they will determine areas to guide their teaching.

Coaching suggestions:  

Focus on these in your next unit to target growth and possible gains.

1)  What did we see that our students can do well?

2)  What did we see over and over that students are struggling with?

3)  Teaching implications – If students are lacking skills in ________, what can I do in my teaching to address this?  In the next unit I should…

4)  What support will the children need to be successful?

•  Ask yourself where will children need support in the next unit?

5)  What support will you need next to be successful?

Teaching well 

Teaching well requires looking at student work and imagining next steps for students. Here’s to an exciting week ahead, full of promise and of course next steps!

Common Core Writing

  Admittedly I am overly-consumed with the writing standards, but my job is coordinating our district's literacy  curriculum and our focus this year is implementing Common Core Writing.  Here's what I hope teachers know about the writing standards, not just because students will be ultimately assessed on these concepts, but also because these standards require students to write and develop their understanding of language.

What writing looks like in the Common Core... 

• The Common Core writing standards are comprised of ten anchor standards. 
• Writing Anchor Standards:
• Text Types & Purposes (W.1, W.2, W.3)
• Production & Distribution of Writing (W.4,W.5, W.6)
• Research to Build & Present Knowledge (W.7,W.8, W.9)
• Range of Writing (W.10)

• Within text types and purposes there are three writing types.  These writing types are referred to as "text" types. The writing text types are --narrative, informational, and opinion. Once students enter sixth-grade, the opinion writing shifts to argument writing because older students should be writing about debatable topics. In the Common Core Standards, students are expected to write within these text types routinely and for a range, or variety, of tasks, purposes and audiences (Range of Writing-Writing Standard 10).  

• Students should be writing a lot. Students should have opportunities to do quick flash drafts in narrative, opinion and information pieces, as well as longer sustained research reports. The more that students can understand and appreciate that writing is an important way to communicate ideas and knowledge, the more success they will have as student writers.   This will ultimately help better prepare them for the college or workforce by making it easier to write as an adult writer within a range of writing applications like: drafting an email to a work colleague, the job application, the request for a day off, or the annual report.

• Students should be writing on a keyboard.  Provide multiple opportunities for students, even our younger students, to compose drafts, generating ideas and take revised and edited drafts to publication whenever possible. If you are in a district that is fortunate to have computers students should be using those computers in writing whenever possible. Even third-graders will be taking the new assessments on-line and they will need to keyboard their responses. Our students need multiple opportunities to feel comfortable and successful on computers since the Common Core Assessments will be technology driven. For more information on this see Smarter Balanced Consortium for a sneak peek at some practice ELA assessments. 

• Keep in mind, in the Common Core language and grammar do not live in the writing standards but they flourish in the language standards, another sub-section of the Common Core. By the time that students are fifth-graders, they should be proficient at the following writing mechanics skills using quotations, dashes, parentheses, commas, correct pronouns, and correct spelling.  This means that all of the other skills have to be mastered in earlier grades, as they are enumerated by the language standards. 

What does Common Core writing looks like in the classroom?

• Students writing daily for extended periods of time 
• Thirty to forty minutes independently writing depending on grade level
• Teacher conferring with individuals or groups of students or leading small group instruction

• Students writing for different purposes and audiences and in different text types...
• Students identify their audience and the purpose of their piece for example-  a possible student response might be I'm writing an All About Skateboarding piece to teach my classmates about skateboarding
• Teacher providing modeled instruction in all three text types: narrative, opinion, and information writing

• Students planning, revising, editing, rewriting and publishing
• Students cycle through the writing process 
• Teacher provides writing workshop structure for students to learn the writing process

• Students studying the work of authors and expert writers to learn a writer's craft and study literary devices
• Students study the different text types of writing 
• Teacher provides modeled instruction through the use of mentor texts or exemplar papers

• Students receive modeled explicit instruction in order to develop and strengthen their writing
• Students study writing strategies and skills 
• Teacher provides demonstration and guided practice instruction of writing strategy and skills 
• (I do, we do, you do model)

• Students using technology to produce and publish pieces as well as gather information from digital sources to support their research reports
• Students using computers in writing whenever possible
• Teachers providing technology as a resource whenever possible in the classroom through the use of computer labs,  classroom computers,  tablets and ipads, electronic books for demonstration lessons etc.

• Guiding Questions-
• How will I increase the rate and rigor of writing in my classroom?
  What is the connection between reading and writing instruction?
• How will I integrate the use of media?

In my role as District Literacy Coach, using the Lucy Calkins Common Core Writing Curriculum as a guide, writing workshop essentials, that reflect much of what I have mentioned above, were developed by myself and my team of elementary instructional coaches.  These essentials are a guiding tool for teachers to develop their writing workshop instructional best practices and for an excellent tool for administrators to guide them in conversations with teachers about the best practice writing instruction taking place in their classrooms. I hope to share more about these writing essentials in a future blog post. If you would like to know more about implementing writing workshop in your primary or intermediate classroom please check out my TpT store for mini lessons addressing the management and routines of writing workshop in primary and intermediate classrooms. 

We are no longer getting ready for the Common Core in schools across the nation. The Common Core is here.  This spring, many districts will be administering pilot tests and the more that we educators understand the CCSS, the better for all of our students. 

If other readers or bloggers have additions to make about what we should know about the writing standards, please share!

Happy Writing!

Kathi

Building A Community of Learners

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: Back to School! I can say that as an educator this time of year is always exciting. This school start has a special excitement, my grandson, Zackary, started Kindergarten. What a thrill it is to see school from his perspective with a fresh pair of little eyes. That milestone for our family caused me to pause in the midst of my “back- to- school” chaos to reflect on what an honor it is to share this journey of discovery and learning with children.

We teachers are truly blessed that we can hone our craft, reinvent our teaching practice and ourselves afresh each year. I know many of you are already back at it, but it’s not too late to make sure you are laying the foundation for an awesome school year.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you go through the first month of instruction.

·     Establish strong classroom community. It’s so tempting these days to jump right into content. The Common Core Standards are here and there is a lot of pressure to “get it all in.” However, if you skip the community-building step, you will find yourself dealing with lots more behavior “drama” issues than necessary all year long. Want to learn more about how to build community? Visit the Responsive Classroom. That site is FULL of great resources and ideas for community building.

Morning Meetings are a great way to start the school day with a positive sense of community. Now that I've seen the power of daily meetings and their impact on student attitudes and behavior, I would never teach without them again.

These are some of my favorite sources of professional books that I have collected over the years for morning meeting activities. Even if you don’t use “Morning Meeting,” some of these activities and ideas make great icebreakers at the beginning of the year.

·     Activities for Morning Meeting

·     The Morning Meeting Book

·     Take time to teach procedures and routines. You already know this. It is the same idea as community- do it right up front so you don’t waste time for the rest of the year dealing with classroom procedures and routines. The goal is to enlist students in developing the classroom rules as well as management and procedures. This is the foundation of a classroom community with the goal of each student being a proficient self-regulated and independent literacy learner. Think of it as going slow to go fast.

I’ve just posted a great resource for teaching the procedures and management of Writing Workshop on my TpT store. 

Building A Community of Writers: Procedural Writing Workshop Mini-Lessons provides mini-lessons on the procedures you’ll want to remember to teach when starting writing workshop. Tuck them into writing workshop before you start a writing mini-lesson. These procedural min-lessons help you lay a strong foundation for our students to become self-regulated writers for the remainder of the year.  

Building A Community of Writers: K-2 is the expanded version of the writing workshop launch support documents I provided teachers in my district. Many teachers have shared that these Building Community lessons have proven to be very helpful in launching workshop successfully!

Building A Community of Writers: K-2 includes a list of great read-alouds for launching narrative in a primary writing workshop as well as examples of anchor charts, workshop tips and strategies.  I think this read aloud list is so helpful I've featured it as a new free product to my TpT store.

·     Make Movement Part of Your Daily Routine. Movement is such a powerful motivator for students and is also a fantastic learning tool. Movement enhances memory – We have learned so much about the human brain and how it learns.  Physical movement is a powerful hook for memory and long-term learning.  Numerous brain researchers tout the benefits of hands-on learning experiences. Learning that is experienced kinesthetically is much more likely to “stick” than sedentary learning experiences.

·     Connect with Parents. Aside from the “normal” communication methods (weekly newsletter, homework agenda, etc.) try to find a simple and personal way to let each child’s parents know that you see something valuable in their child. Here are some ways to do this: a short note home, a quick email, a brief phone call home, a concise conversation that communicates:

1) You are getting to know their child

2) You care about their child

3) You are excited to share in their learning journey

That simple reassurance goes far with parents and will set a positive foundation in the event that in the future you need to communicate with them about academic or behavioral concerns.

I am so excited to start a new school year with you. Stay tuned… I have a lot of ideas for literacy learning up my sleeve. Have a FABULOUS beginning to your school year! 

 What’s on your Back to School to do list? What do you make sure to do during the first month of instruction? I’d love to hear!

Happy School Year!

Who Doesn't Love A Good Sale?

It's Back to School and everyone is off shopping for school supplies and that includes me! I'm so excited to share with you that today, Sunday, and tomorrow, Monday, is the HUGE BACK TO SCHOOL SALE (B2S) on TeachersPayTeachers! As you probably already know TpT throws a big sale about once a quarter. During this time, teacher sellers put their store on sale and TpT takes an additional 10% off that. It means a savings of 28%! My cart is chock full of goodies and I hope you will take advantage of this golden opportunity to stock up on some amazing school supplies from teacher sellers.

Beginning Saturday at midnight, enter COUPON CODE: BTS13 at check-out to take advantage of deep discounts.

Hello Two Peas News!

I am also thrilled and delighted to announce that my business partner, Jen Jones,  and I have completed one year of phonological awareness curriculum. We are super tickled that Mrs. Willis featured our phonological awareness curriculum in her Kindergarten Curriculum Maps, and for this publicity and endorsement, we are grateful. We truly have received so much positive feedback for this quick easy 10-minutes-a-day scripted program, teachers have shared with time and time again what a life saver this curriculum has been and how much they students love it.

 You can purchase each monthly set separately, at $6.00, or you can purchase the year bundle for $58.00, which is a 20% savings when you purchase them as a bundle.

Due to popular demand from teachers, like you, have begun to write our second set of our Phonological Awareness Curriculum. You can find these new monthly bundles on our HelloTwoPeas TpT store. Just in time to start the year off right, we have created a stand-alone, use- anytime, bundle featuring Kevin Henkes books. Kevin Henkes is an amazing author to feature at the beginning of the year when building community with students. The Henkes bundle features four of his most popular titles to support you in your building community lessons with students.

A free week sampler of our curriculum (from the second set) can be downloaded here. Try it and see if you like it. The second set is not different in format from the first set. We've selected titles more geared towards first grade although our first set is still appropriate for both Kindergarten and First grade.

We have found in both our districts (Jen's school and Kathi's district) as well as in other schools implementing our Two Peas PA curriculum that Kindergarten teachers are using one set and First Grade teachers are using another (different) set so the second set is underway! YAY!! Keep checking back for more posts about this as we continue to add more months to our HelloTwoPeas store on TPT. For now,  the September bundle,  our first month of the new series. is available.

 In this new set we've strategically selected books that would support the most common reading comprehension strategies being taught in first grade like: Schema,  Text to Self, Text to Text, Questioning, Making Predictions, Inferring and Determining Importance in Non-fiction etc. Taking our lead from the emphasis the Common Core places on informational texts we've been sure to include one non-fiction title in each of the monthly bundles.

Hello Two Peas goes Techy

Here's a key feature that might simplify your teaching life, our HelloTwoPeas PA Curriculum doesn't have to be run off. Since it's a PDF file, you can open it iBooks use it straight from your iPad. Follow these steps below to for a simple easy-to-use instructional tool.

Please remember to purchase additional licenses if you purchase this curriculum for every teacher on your team or grade level. Thank you! Multiple licenses are purchased at check-out.

Some Other Products That Might Interest You...

Some other products that you might be interested in are my Common Core Aligned grade level specific English Language Arts Curricular maps and Common Core Aligned ELA Bundle . These maps are designed to compliment the 2012 Lucy Calkins Common Core Reading and Writing Workshop materials.

These materials were released from Heinemann Publishing last year (NOT to be confused with her newly released 2013 Common Core Writing Workshop Curriculum). So if you already own these 2012 electronic files (they are no longer available for purchase) my curricular maps would be a supportive planning tool. The curricular maps show the scope and sequence of the ELA Common Core Standards when using the 2012 Calkins reading and writing curriculum. For those of you using her newly released CCSS writing curriculum I am in the process of re-writing these curricular maps to align with her new produce. They are coming shortly, I promise!!

As you begin the new year perhaps my on-line literacy toolkit  might be be useful to you in finding online literacy webpages to support your literacy instruction. It's my freebie on TpT.