Group items tagged

Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions The following resources reflect Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe's Understanding by Design model of "backwards design". Use the collection of articles, explanations and standards to transform our standards into essential understandings.

NWREL scoring practice on anchor papers

There is absolutely no better way to understand the 6+1 Trait® Scoring analytical model than to use it yourself. Whether you are a teacher or a student, this instructional tool will help you better understand each of the six traits of writing. You will first have to select which area of writing you want to focus on. Select from the list below to further study an individual trait.

"Inference: Reading Ideas as Well as Words Ideally, speakers mean what they say and say what they mean. Spoken communication is not that simple. Much of what we understand-whether when listening or reading-we understand indirectly, by inference. Listening involves a complex combination of hearing words, analyzing sentence structure, and attempting to find meaning within the context of the given situation."

Classroom Strategies Explicit strategy instruction is at the core of good comprehension instruction. "Before" strategies activate students' prior knowledge and set a purpose for reading. "During" strategies help students make connections, monitor their understanding, generate questions, and stay focused. "After" strategies provide students an opportunity to summarize, question, reflect, discuss, and respond to text. Teachers should help students to understand why a strategy is useful, how it is used, and when it is appropriate. Teacher demonstration and modeling are critical factors for success, and student discussion following strategy instruction is also helpful. The most frequently researched strategies can be applied across content areas; other content-area specific strategies are emerging, and we will include them here in the future.

"Explicit Comprehension Strategy Instruction By: National Institute for Literacy (2008) Use explicit strategy instruction to make visible the invisible comprehension strategies that good readers use to understand text. Support students until they can use the strategies independently. Recycle and re-teach strategies throughout the year. "

Expository Writing

What is Expository Writing? Exposition is a type of oral or written discourse that is used to explain, describe, give information or inform. The creator of an expository text can not assume that the reader or listener has prior knowledge or prior understanding of the topic that is being discussed. One important point to keep in mind for the author is to try to use words that clearly show what they are talking about rather then blatantly telling the reader what is being discussed. Since clarity requires strong organization, one of the most important mechanisms that can be used to improve our skills in exposition is to provide directions to improve the organization of the text.

Summarizing can be highly effective for helping students identify main ideas, generalize, remove redundancy, integrate ideas, and improve memory for what is read. It is especially worthwhile when used with other strategies such as generating questions and answering questions (NRP, 2000). Although sometimes considered similar to synthesizing, it is important to note that summarizing is more of a part of synthesizing. While creating a synthesis lends itself toward the achievement of creating a new perspective or thought out of what one is reading, summarizing provides more of an opportunity to understand and restate the text (Harvey & Goudvis, 2000).

One of the main goals of reading is to possess the ability to understand, or comprehend, what you have just read. A great strategy to help children comprehend text is to teach them how to summarize.

Exploring poetry through film This activity is designed to enable students who have some understanding of film-technique to use this to develop and share interpretations of poetry.

Through the use of dramatic reading and the exploration of Internet resources, sixth- through eighth-grade students build a greater understanding of poetry and the poet's voice. Further, the experience requires students to analyze and develop their own interpretation of a poem's meaning and representation through performance. Extension activities involve students giving an oral poetry performance of their own poetry writing.

POETRY UNIT

The Hip Hop Circuit illustrates the connectedness among Hip Hop, Popular Culture and, Education. This website is designed to facilitate the promotion of understanding the histoical importance of hip hop, to provide interesting instructional strategies for teachers to use hip hop in the classroom, and to give members of a larger community a mechinism to expand their knowledge base of Hip Hop, Popular Culture and, Education.

Introducing Poems This is a set of strategies to help students of all ages get to know and appreciate individual poems. As well as assisting students to make meaning from poems, the strategies help to develop an understanding of style. They also offer support for students' own poetry writing. Many of the strategies originally appeared in Approaches to Poetry, published by The Department of Education and TATE.

These are just a very few examples of different types of poetry. Most of the definitions have at least one example of each particular type of poetry for better understanding. All examples were provided by the members of Shadow Poetry or previous Egroup. More definitions for related poetry items may be found in the Shadow Poetry Handbook (link located above). As a bonus, we feature poetry forms created by selected poets as new and challenging writing styles. Try not only the traditional forms, but some of the rewarding invented formats as well!

Class # U3X8Y2 Student numbers: spx001-spx040

This web site provides an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and improving student writing based on the Six Traits Writing model. The links below provide an overview of the model along with the scoring rubrics for each trait. Exercises provided here will give students and teachers a chance to read sample writings, rate them, and compare their ratings with ratings made by English teachers. This will provide a valuable opportunity for both students and teachers to improve their understanding of the Six Traits and, in the end, improve their own writing.

"This web site provides an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and improving student writing based on the Six Traits Writing model. The links below provide an overview of the model along with the scoring rubrics for each trait. Exercises provided here will give students and teachers a chance to read sample writings, rate them, and compare their ratings with ratings made by English teachers. This will provide a valuable opportunity for both students and teachers to improve their understanding of the Six Traits and, in the end, improve their own writing."

A unique aspect of children's memoir writing is that their collection of memories, wisdom and value is limited. That is not to say these memories do not exist. Children should be given the opportunity to develop an understanding of who they are and where they come from, and how this is connected to the past & future, the near & far away. A memoir study focusing on location as a theme can provide this opportunity.

Once Upon a Fairy Tale: Teaching Revision as a Concept Overview Students sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between the global issues of revision and the local ones of editing. After reading several fractured fairy tales, students make a list of the ways the original stories have been revised-changed or altered, not just "corrected"-to begin building a definition of global revision. After students have written a "revised" story of their own, they revise again, focusing more on audience but still paying attention to ideas, organization, and voice. During another session, students look at editing as a way to polish writing, establishing a definition of revision as a multi-level process.

"Using Graphic Organizers Graphic organizers are excellent tools for helping students connect ideas and see relationships between different pieces of information. The goal is for students to expand their knowledge by understanding the material in their own way. Graphic organizers can be used for a variety of purposes, such as eliciting prior knowledge, demonstrating a sequence of events, and comparing and contrasting. "

"Poets.org has partnered with TextTelevision to offer TextFlows, an alternative approach to reading and experiencing poetry. By converting text dynamically into Flash animation, poems are revealed phrase by phrase through motion and light, and at a pace controlled by the reader. The simplified words and crisp motion fixes one's attention on the subtleties of language, increasing involvement, engagement, and understanding"