Writing 101

Introduction:  Wherever possible, the teacher should encourage note-taking, and dictations to teach points rather than handouts.  The students should begin working at their individual pace, i.e., the teacher should not be controlling the class at one pace.  By about week 3: when the teacher enters the classroom, the students should begin work without direction.  Writing class means they write.  We are encouraging autonomous learning.  Once the teacher starts making corrections, it is advisable to have students working on another writing task.  Also, make corrections to the first section of their paper to avoid holdups.  The teachers primary task will be to support students through making recommendations and corrections. 

Week 1 – level check and stream students.  All teachers work together and stream students.  

Introduction: Modules 1 & 2 (weeks 1 – 5) Objectives:  introduce students to formatting, audience, purpose, planning, editing, and basic cohesion.  At this point we are not going to introduce genre. 

MODULE 1
Week 2 - General introduction: formatting, writing and its purpose
Objective – To get across the idea of AUDIENCE and PURPOSE.  RE: Audience,  the main idea is that the students understand they are writing for future publication. RE: Purpose, the main idea is that they stay on topic and they understand that they are writing to communicate to the reader.   Use the handout Break the Silence.   Task: writing about communication following the gist of the handout;  giving opinions and talking from experience.  (Option: this can be graded depending on the teacher’s preference.)

Week 3 - Writing for fluency practice (Writing for fluency in this scenario means writing under time constraints and completing the task).  Method: -  The teacher should handout the selected picture story from Totally True or Can You Believe it.  After reading the story several times, students will then retell the story using the pictures but no text.  Teacher then checks for formatting and major mistakes.  The teacher then should make several corrections using the CORRECTION SYMBOLS (handout) guide in the class.  Students then attempt to make corrections using the guide.

MODULE 2
Week 4 - Warm-up; This is a controlled sentence level writing task (Resource; Weaving it together p.69 Prompts on laughing).  The teacher reads the questions from the resource and Task: students take dictation. Then, students respond in writing and write a paragraph in timed a writing exercise of 45 minutes.  B.  The teacher introduces the six colored hats using the blackboard; Task: Students take notes.  Task 3: Students write six questions about the topic HS days using the six colors.  If they don’t complete this it should be assigned homework.


Week 5  - Objective:  This lesson follows from week 4 and reinforces the idea of using a plan.  Student task: Using the writing plan from previous week, respond to questions in paragraph form.  Students look at the list of questions on the topic of HS days and write a paragraph.  They should format correctly, follow their plan, and make corrections following the correction symbols guide after teacher adds correction symbols.  This assignment should be evaluated and the score recorded following the evaluation criteria below.  

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