Integrate The Objectives
Posted by drpezz on November 13, 2011
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.
peekacho said
How did it go?
drpezz said
A complete success!
The students dove right into the assignment, and I had the highest rate of return I’ve had on any writing this year. The best part was that I could easily pinpoint the standard each student needed to work on, which made rewrites pretty easy.