The last two skills I am going to share with you in my "Think and Writes" series are List and Describe the Picture. Check the bottom of this post for links to the previous posts in this series.
List is my students' all time favorite. I always save it for Fridays. It is a fun way to see what vocabulary words students know within a certain topic or theme. List is exactly like it sounds. I put a topic on the board. The students have 4 minutes to write a list of all the words they think fit in that topic. Spelling does not matter. If they can't think of the word in English, then they can write out a description. If they are not sure it fits the category, they can write it anyway, and we will discuss at the end.
When the 4 minutes is up, we go around the room and start naming the words they wrote. I record the words on the white board. If you wrote a word that has been called by a classmate, you put a check by it. This gives us a chance to share what words we know as well as introduce some new words that classmates know. When we are out of words, we count them and write our total on the board. This is the one "Think and Write" that I don't differentiate for grade levels or language acquisition. We have a little competition to see which group could think of the highest number of words. On Monday, I give the winning group a sticker for their notebooks. It is rare that the same group wins two weeks in a row.
Here are some topics I have used: transportation, things with numbers, weather words, animal adaptations, U.S. states, character traits, landforms, color words, animals with wings, vegetables, etc.
Depending on my levels of language acquisition, I call the final "Think and Writes" either Describe the Picture or I See. My goal for this skill is to get students to write detailed sentences or paragraphs about what they see. I scaffold this with a teacher example (of a different picture) and a paragraph frame. As the year progresses, I can take away that scaffolding if it is no longer needed. I ask the class what words they need from the picture, and we will work together to label the picture. It is like we are making a word box. Then students will write to describe what they notice in the picture. For my higher students, I encourage them to start their writing with a topic sentence. I use the hamburger model a lot when teaching writing so I may have a hamburger drawn on the screen.
 |
| In the classroom, I write the words students call out directly on the white board where my picture is projected. |
As students finish their writing, I remind them to reread their sentences to see if they make sense. A lot of mistakes can be caught by just reading aloud. I then read their sentences and give feedback on capitalization, punctuation, academic vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. This"Think and Write" skill takes the longest so I sometimes let them just share their favorite sentence with the class.
I hope this series has been helpful. Click below to visit my previous posts on "Think and Writes."
Happy Adventuring,
Heidi
0 comments:
Post a Comment