Help From the Blogosphere

I’m looking for different timed write formats to teach to my students. I’m curious what people are doing.

What formats or structures do you have your students use when composing a timed write, especially AP prompts?

I thank you in advance.

Integrate The Objectives

Well, I’m neck-deep in paperwork, meetings, and planning, but everything is working out well. Still, I want to accomplish three goals this week:

• to have the students write in a different (and more fun) mode,
• to force the students to review a literary work, and
• to encourage my students to write with more sentence variety.

I am giving my students an assignment to write a break-up letter to someone in the style of The Declaration of Independence using the four structural elements as the format. Each student’s letter must have a preamble, a declaration of rights, a list of complaints, and a statement of independence.

In addition, the students have to (correctly) label and use a simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentence within the body of the letter (one each is the minimum but two each is required for a top score).

I think this short writing will present a challenge and allow some creativity. I’m excited to see how it goes.

This Week In Censorship

The Seattle School District is backing off of a policy that would curtail students’ free expression rights. This is one more victory for free speech, students, and the press.

Read more here.

The Antigone Study Guide

Based on an older post about how I teach Antigone, I get requests almost daily for my study guides on Antigone. Here they are:

Prologue Questions

Scene 1 Questions

Scene 2 Questions

Scoring Essays

I spent the last week teaching my students how to score AP essays, and they did a fantastic job!

We looked at the AP writing rubric and a retired prompt on Monday, and then scored a single paper based on that prompt each day this week. As we moved through the week, the kids’ scoring got more accurate each day.

The kids would read an essay and then put the score on a sticky note. I would then have a student grab the stickies in the vicinity, and the students would then put them up on the chart I made on the white board. This created a bar graph on the board for us to look at.

Then, I would ask the students to share their scores and explain why the score is appropriate using the rubric and evidence from the essay in the explanation. The kids actually started to debate the scores a bit, and I simply acted as a moderator.

Next, I asked the students if they wished to change their scores on the board. About 5-10 kids would have me move their stickies based on the conversations about the essay.

Once the stickies were finalized on the graph, I gave the students the actual score and explained the reasons. I allowed the students one more time to react, and then we looked at our accuracy.

On Thursday I gave the students a prompt I wrote based on the novel we’re reading, and I’m going to use the AP scoring guide to assess them.

This coming Monday I will hand out the students’ papers, have the kids look over what they wrote, write down with a colored pen what they would have done differently, and then try to score their essay using the AP rubric.

Lastly, I will give them their scores, and they will explain why our scores match or do not match.

All in all, it was a great week of talking about writing and assessing writing. From a geeky English teacher perspective: what a great sequence of days!