Our Values and 5 Star Work

Although this is an old item, it is something that we do at the beginning of every school year and that I believe I will continue to do with every class that I have. I think that in order to establish routine and expectations in a class, it is important to set out the values that are determined by the students themselves.

Here are the values we created this year: 

We value positivity, acceptance, co-operation, respect, honesty and organisation.

We also create a criteria for what qualifies as five star work in maths, reading, writing, handwriting and independent work. These are posted in the classroom and are referred to while students on working on activities in all subject areas. Before students can submit work for marking, they need to check that they have created five star work. 

Q

Writing Unit Sequence

You may have noticed a bit of a pattern that I use when teaching a writing unit. I often start the units the same way, as I believe that these core lessons are utterly important in any writing genre. I thought I would give you a quick run-down on the sequence of lessons I use to start a writing unit. These are usually all taught within the first two weeks of introducing the new writing genre. 

So here we go...

Lesson 1: Writing pre-test for the genre

Lesson 2: Discovery Chart to identify features and structure of the genre

Lesson 3: Deconstruction of a sample text 

Lesson 4: Joint creation (teacher and students) of a rubric 

Lesson 5: Student evaluation of their pre-test with the rubric created by the class

Lesson 6: Student creation of own writing goals for the genre based on their self-evaluation with the rubric (this leads to the creation of a writing goals poster)

And after this is done, we begin to work more in detail on specific genre of writing. Hope this spawns some wonderful ideas for writing in your classroom!

Writing Ladder

Another strategy for giving students greater accountability and ownership over their work!

As my students were working on writing their information reports, I found that many students were struggling to move on in their writing. Students spent more than usual on certain paragraphs and I couldn't understand why. Now, not that this tool explains it, but it was an excellent way of helping students finish their work. 

We started with every student having a little laminated name tag. I created a writing ladder that had a new coloured paper for each part of the information report. All students put their name tag on the top of the ladder (the classification). When they finished writing this part and it was checked by the teacher, they moved their name down to the next part of the ladder/their information report. 

This strategy relates to the e5 Instructional Model components of engage and evaluate.  

- Engage: Teachers provide support for students to create and achieve their learning goals. 

- Evaluate: Students are able to evaluate their progress and achievements. 

Students absolutely loved this writing ladder and could not wait to see their name move to the next part. It worked extremely well as I would tell students the expectation was that their name moved to the next part during a writing session. Instead of just having the expectation verbally stated to the students, the visual of seeing their name moving and them making progress helped students to write wonderful reports!