All at once...

Term 1 ends on Friday. Yikes.

I planned ahead and told students that all missing, late, and revised work had to be turned in on Wednesday by 3:00pm. 

(I started telling them that last week and even had them write it down in their planners. We'll see how that goes.)

But that means I have to have all work turned back to them for revisions with enough time for them to revise! So my weekend was full of personal narratives. You're talking narratives coming out of my ears.

What did I learn from my overdose of 7th and 8th grade writing?

Their metaphors and similes are hilarious. They've definitely got the meaning of the term down, but I didn't expect them to be so dramatic...

"I sprinted for the door like a cheetah taking off after its prey in the wilderness..." 

"My head hit the ground like a bouncy ball on the concrete..." 

It was so great - I shared a lot of the stories with my husband and we had a blast.

What else did I learn? 

Students obviously didn't digest dialogue and quotation marks very well. While grading the narratives by period, I was able to see some patterns that informed my instruction today and my instruction for term 2. 

Here are my notes:

Post Narrative Must Review:
1st period: Quotation (changing paragraphs when changing speakers), "are" vs. "our"
2nd period: Quotation formatting, read aloud punctuation
3rd period: Caps (when to use, when not to use), caps for proper nouns,
4th period: Quotation (changing paragraphs when changing speakers)
6th period: Run ons
7th period: punctuation (read aloud to hear the breaks and pauses), narrative doesn’t = summary
ALL: Difference between metaphor and simile, compound nouns ("I and my teammates"), when and when not to use all caps, thoughts in italics, quotation formatting, compound sentences,

With all of this need for improvement and review, did I feel like I'd failed? Yes! Oh goodness, yes! But I took a day to digest it all and realized that review is a good thing!

So today's Reader Response was very authentic and purposeful. I had students working in pairs to share their responses (this worked well in some classes, not so much in others, though I liked that more students were engaged than they were when one student presented at the front of the class), and I simply asked how many of them shared a favorite passage that included dialogue. I had students turn in their novels to an example of dialogue to tell me what they noticed about quotations.

Then I pulled up my own example (from The Maze Runner) and looked at it specifically. We got to talk about a lot of different elements, but I hit the problems I saw in their narratives. And I hit it hard. With all of the student involvement, it was evident that students knew the answers - they just forgot about paying attention to those elements in their narratives!

What did I learn? It means something more when I can say, "I'm going over this because I saw this as an issue in your narratives! I would pay attention so you know how to revise your narrative dialogue correctly before Wednesday!"

I love this "Assessment informs teaching" thing. Yeah, it sometimes feels like I'm not making any headway (if I get them to format their quotations correctly, they forget to write in complete sentences), but I'm also teaching strategies here. If they forget (down the line, hopefully!) how to correctly write a quote, they know they can look at a book and figure it out! And I definitely made them aware of that.

It's all about why. And about being transparent enough to ensure that the why isn't a secret to them!