Dramatic Academic Growth
Qualitative Assessments
The ability to express one’s thoughts and ideas in writing is crucial for success in school, in the workforce, and in engaging in modern society. It is not surprising that the Common Core State Standards explicitly lay out expectations for students’ writing skills as early as kindergarten. One of the best ways to help my students develop writing skills is to give them regular exposure to engaging writing activities. If students have writing tools available and time to write regularly they will naturally experiment with printmaking and beginning writing.
In Kindergarten, writing takes on many forms and looks as students writing growth progresses. Emergent writing skills are considered to have five stages which students progress through showing continual growth from the beginning of kindergarten to the end (2013).
Stage one: Students use pictures and scribbles to communicate their writing.
Stage two: Students use random letters and sometimes initial sounds in their writing.
Stage three: Students use initial sounds or both initial and final sounds in their writing which consists mostly of consonants.
Stage four: Students begin using vowels, word walls, and inventive spelling to communicate their ideas. Students begin to use punctuation and spacing.
Stage five: Students show an understanding of multiple syllable words and use correctly spelled words in sentences.
All year long, whether they’re following along with modeled writing instruction or writing on their own, my kindergartners start learning the basics of sentence structure. This includes capitalizing I (when referring to themselves) and the first letter of the first word in a sentence; ending their sentences with a period (and knowing that it’s called a period); ending their questions with a question mark (and knowing that it’s called a question mark); using finger space to separate their words; and learning to label illustrations to help others understand their thinking. Making growth in all of these areas are required for students to meet grade level expectations by the end of the year.
Kindergarten Writing Prompts
In my classroom, I provide various opportunities for writing each day. Much of the writing instruction is independent writing through pretend play opportunities and informal writing students choose. Students also are exposed to authentic writing activities like making cards, writing letters, and writing down research for a report. Besides these activities students are exposed to traditional writing instruction three times a week through journal writing prompts.
Writing journal prompts that are part our weekly routine helps students develop particular writing skills. Students have twenty minutes to work on writing prompts three times a week. During this time students are to work independently on writing. They can use their guided reading dictionary, the sight word wall, and the thematic unit word wall that is in my classroom to help spell unknown words. At the beginning of the year before whole class journal writing, I model writing where I think aloud as I share what I am writing about with input from students. As we move on through the year, by December, students begin to take on more ownership of the process and individuals will come up to model their thinking and take my place in the instruction. By the end of the year, students even move to a peer review style of journal writing.
While some kids are naturally inclined to write often on their own, others are not as attracted to regular writing activities. By including writing prompts into my weekly classroom routine, students get the chance to do meaningful writing more regularly. This helps to develop confidence in their writing abilities and drives them to want to write more on their own.
Journal writing prompts also expose students to a wide variety of topics to write about. This allows students to practice the three kinds of writing that are required in Kindergarten under Common Core Standards: opinion, informative, and narrative forms.
By using writing prompts I can get students to participate in all the different types of writing. In our writing journal prompts we have included informational non-fiction writing prompts, narrative writing prompts, and opinion writing prompts, and persuasive writing prompts.
To the left, you can see an example of the type of writing prompts that are used in my classroom. Each prompt has a student checklist of the big writing goals for them to master during the year. The three slides following the writing prompt are exemplary examples of students' writing that are meeting grade level expectations.
My school currently does not have any specific writing curriculum, assessments, or rubrics to follow. For this reason, I chose to use artifacts from the writing journal because students have limited assistance while completing them and it is easy to compare samples for growth throughout the year. These writing journals help provide a writing foundation for students. They also provide learners with the practice they need to meet the Common Core Standards by the end of the year.
Writing Rubrics
I carefully monitoring students' writing habits to assess strengths and weaknesses to promote students' success in writing. I then give feedback that will reinforce newly learned skills and correct recurring problems.
I use rubrics to track my students' writing growth. These rubrics enable me to explain the writing expectations and grading criteria to my students.
Rubrics help me authentically monitor a student's learning process and provide a way for a student and a teacher to measure the quality of a body of work. These rubrics also help me develop and revise a lesson plan to help reteach aspects that students are struggling with. I also am able to use rubrics to quickly differentiate specific skills and strategies in response to student needs.
To meet the Common Core Standard for kindergarten writing students must use a combination of drawing, dictating, and writing to compose a text in which students describe what they are writing about and supply some information about the topic (n.d).
I use two rubrics to help monitor student progress towards their end of the year goals. Both rubrics are included on the left. The first rubric is the one I use with my students. I use the second rubric to help parents understand the growth their child needs to achieve by the end of the year.
The parent rubric provides in-depth information on where the student is currently performing compared to grade level expectations. Student who receive a mark of at least three out of four are meeting Common Core writing standards for the end of the year. Students must be able to write using inventive/phonetic spelling to earn a three on the rubric. Their spelling must include medial short vowels and most consonant sounds. Finger spacing and proper capitalization of letters must be consistent and end punctuation is present. Students must be able to write more than one sentence around a variety of topics.
References:
English Language Arts Standards, Writing, Kindergarten. (n.d.). Retrieved April 12, 2018, from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/K/
State Indiana Department of Education. (2013, July 24). Developmental Stages of Writing. Retrieved March 24, 2018, from https://www.education.com/reference/article/developmental-stages-writing/