language arts Archives - Page 3 of 8

Mini-Timed Writings: Getting Students to Write More Without More Grading

January 17, 2016 By David Rickert 1 Comment

We all know that the best way to improve our students’ writing is by having them write more. However, it’s no fun to think about grading all of those extra papers, especially when you already have piles of stuff already to grade. The back log can get pretty unmanageable and frustrating, especially when you have to plan, grade other stuff you’ve collected, and finish watching the first season of Jessica Jones (or is that just me?) Mini-timed writings get your students writing more without adding a whole lot more to your grading. Plus they seem like a test, rather than a quick write or a journal, so students tend to do their best work.

A timed writing is an assessment that typically takes the whole period. Students are given a prompt, such as a personal narrative or a persuasive essay, or they might have to respond to a poem or an article. The have the period to write about it. This not only helps them prepare for the writing they will do on the ACT, SAT, and state tests, but it’s also a good measure of how much they know because they can’t consult outside sources.

A mini-timed writing only takes half the period. The idea for mini-timed writings came out of my AP classes, where timed writings are frequent assessments. I wanted to give them some practice that didn’t require the same amount of time, and then decided it worked well enough to use in my other classes too.

With a mini-timed writing, students have 25 minutes (about half the period) to write on a topic. For instance, we have been studying Emily Dickinson’s poetry for a couple of weeks, and this week I gave my students a mini-timed writing on the Emily Dickinson poem “Faith is the Pierless Bridge”:

Faith—is the Pierless Bridge
Supporting what We see
Unto the Scene that We do not—
Too slender for the eye

It bears the Soul as bold
As it were rocked in Steel
With Arms of Steel at either side—
It joins—behind the Veil

To what, could We presume
The Bridge would cease to be
To Our far, vacillating Feet
A first Necessity.

Their final assessment for the Dickinson unit is a paper, so the mini-timed writing is designed to help them prepare for that.

The prompt was simple: According to Emily Dickinson, how is faith like a bridge? I gave them the poem and the prompt, set 25 minutes on the timer, and let them have at it.

After the 25 minutes was up, I asked them to respond to the following questions at the bottom of the essay:

What did you find difficult about the poem?

What did you find difficult about writing?

What do you need to improve before the essay?

On all three questions I want them to be specific. “I need to get better at reading poetry” is not helpful. “I don’t understand how to write about word choice” is much better.

We use the time remaining in the period to discuss their responses to these three questions. Students share their struggles and I get an immediate idea of what I need to teach or review before the next formal writing assignment. I then collect their papers and read over what they wrote. I want to have a general idea of what skills we need to work on before the next essay, so I pick three things that seem to be common problems to target with mini-lessons. However, I also have good self-reflection from the students to look at that give me even more information of what they find difficult. All of this occurs in one period!

The benefits of mini-timed writings:

You can write one and debrief in one period.
Students are engaged in an authentic writing task.
You get immediate feedback on where your students need help.
You don’t have to grade them thoroughly if you don’t want to.
It’s a good test of what students can do because they can’t cheat.
They are good warm-ups for longer, more formal papers.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

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How to Grade Faster

January 5, 2016 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

I don’t know a single teacher who would rather grade than teach (and if you do, give me your address. I’ll send you a large package with a self-addressed stamped envelope with some essays. Thanks!) However, grading essays, tests, and homework is part of the responsibility of being a teacher. If students would simply learn everything that we taught them, we wouldn’t need to grade anything at all! But they don’t, so we have to grade assessments to make sure that they have learned what they need to know, and make adjustment if they don’t.

If you’re an English teacher like me, you can easily be bombarded with papers. It can seem like the stack will never get smaller and just when it does, a new set of papers comes in. What can you do? Here are some strategies that have helped me over the years. And no, assign less work is not one of the strategies.

Set a deadline.

My goal is to get papers back a week after they are handed in. I don’t always accomplish it, but setting this deadline for myself is one of the best ways I’ve found to help me stay on task and get them back quickly.

If you’re especially brave, tell your students your goal. It will help keep you accountable.

Find your most productive time.

I have 1st period and 7th period off, and I’m a much quicker grader in the morning than in the afternoon. My mind is fresh and I don’t get distracted easily. On the weekends if I have papers to grade I’m likely to do them first thing in the morning on Saturday and Sunday. Those are the times when I feel like I can crank out a bunch of papers. Make sone tea, turn on some classical music, sit in the early morning sun, and I’m ready to go.

Be aware of the times of day that seem to work best for you. Grade during those times and do other tasks during the other times. I don’t check my email first thing once I get to school, because that can easily rob me of fifteen minutes I could have spent grading. I save that for much later in the day.

Pair grading with something you like to do.

On the rare occasions where I’m grading something in the evening, I like to have a glass of wine. I know some teachers who love to grade in their pajamas – even in the afternoon! Pairing something you don’t want to do with something you like to do is a great way to make the task less of a chore. Put on some of your favorite chill out music and grab that pen and go.

Create cues.

Yoga teacher Erica Jago always lights a candle in her office when she writes. This signals to her mind that it’s time to get to work.

Similarly, we can create these cues in our own lives that signal to our brains when it’s grading time. Make a cup of tea, listen to a certain CD, go to a certain place in the building. I like to grade in the media center in our school with a cup of tea. Once we signal to our brains that grading is what we are supposed to be doing, it’s easier to get in the flow and crank out some papers.

Don’t grade for yourself.

I have been guilty of putting way too many comments on students’ papers. I put comments on the paper to justify the grade I give them rather than to teach them how to do better the next time.

Excessive comments take up time, and if the students don’t read them when you hand them back, it’s a waste of time. Don’t grade to prove that the students deserves the grade you give them. Only put meaningful, purposeful comments that will help students do better the next time. If the students have questions about how they can do better, or don’t understand the grade they received you can address it then. A good rubric will also help you to make less comments.

You can also make the argument that if your assignment is summative – like a test or an exam – you don’t need to add any comments at all. If you’re only trying to assess what students have learned, all you need to do is give a grade.

Timeliness beats thoroughness.

I could go through a stack of essays and add numerous comments and mark every mistake, but if I hand them back two months later, it would do much good. Feedback is best when it’s received as quickly as possible. It’s much better to only mark a few things and get papers back quickly rather than be meticulous and get them back long after the students have forgotten what they’ve written.

Teaching Similes and Metaphors With Emily Dickinson

December 10, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

I read once that a reliable indicator of a person’s intelligence is their ability to understand metaphors. I don’t know if this is true or not, but helping students understand similes and metaphors is one of the most valuable lessons we can teach them. For one thing, the English language is full of metaphors-it’s always fascinated me how often we don’t mean exactly what we say when we communicate. But unfortunately, many of our students are stuck at the “life is like a box of chocolates” stage of understanding similes and metaphors, and we can help them move beyond that. Poetry is one of the best way to do that.

I like to introduce metaphors to my students with this poem by Emily Dickinson. It’s a riddle poem, so students first have to figure out what it is from the clues that Dickinson gives us in the form of similes and metaphors. And since it’s about (SPOILER ALERT!) snow, it’s certainly timely for winter.

Here’s the poem:

It sifts from Leaden Sieves –

It powders all the Wood.

It fills with Alabaster Wool

The Wrinkles of the Road –

It makes an even Face

Of Mountain, and of Plain –

Unbroken Forehead from the East

Unto the East again –

It reaches to the Fence –

It wraps it Rail by Rail

Till it is lost in Fleeces –

It deals Celestial Vail

To Stump, and Stack – and Stem –

A Summer’s empty Room –

Acres of Joints, where Harvests were,

Recordless, but for them –

It Ruffles Wrists of Posts

As Ankles of a Queen –

Then stills it’s Artisans – like Ghosts –

Denying they have been –

So what do I ask students to do with the poem?

1. Find the similes and metaphors.

Once the students figure out that the poem is about snow, is ask them to find all the things that snow is compared to that allowed them to figure it out. It seems like a pretty easy task, but it gets complicated right away in the first two lines with an implied metaphor – a comparison where the figurative and the metaphorical are not directly stated. Snow is compared to flour (or sugar), but neither word appears. The “leaden sieves” are the clouds (another metaphor). Implied metaphors are a concept that moves beyond a limited understanding of metaphors to a more advanced concept.

2. Examine the word choice in the metaphors.

The next thing I ask students to do is consider the words that are being used to describe the snow. What kind of snowfall is Dickinson writing about? “Sifts,” “powders,” and “fills” are all gentle verbs. Also, the snow is compared to “fleece” and “ruffles.” This is a gentle snowfall and not a raging blizzard.

3. Provide a reason for the shift in tone that occurs in the fourth stanza.

However, everything changes once we get to the final stanza where we have a significant shift in tone. The last thing I like to ask students to do is identify the shift and explain which words create it. Those words are “ghosts,” and to a lesser extent, “deny they have been.” I ask the students what the difference is. I want students to come to the realization that snow not only softens the landscape, but also can uniformly cover the landscape. The shift in tone that occurs in poems is an important skill for readers to develop, as well as the understanding that rarely do poets feel only one way about their subject matter.

Of course there are other literary devices at work here – personification being the most obvious – but for a quick introduction on metaphors and similes, this poem has worked well for me.

If you’d like a FREE lesson on this poem that you can use tomorrow, click the link below. I’ve created a comic in which Emily Dickinson teaches the poem, as well as another Dickinson riddle poem that reinforces the concept of similes and metaphors. And it’s yours for free just by clicking the box!

Learning should be fun! Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for fun comic resources like those below.

How I Survived my First Reader’s Workshop Conference

November 11, 2015 By David Rickert 1 Comment

Using reader’s workshop in the high school English classroom is a teaching practice that has been generating a lot of buzz. Elementary teachers having been using it for years, and it has slowly made its way through the middle school into the upper grades. It’s a terrific idea: kids pick books they’d like to read and work on a variety of tasks involving those books instead of reading class novels that are set at a specific level that may not be appropriate for students’ lexile level. It sounds like a logistical nightmare for someone like me who favors an orderly and predictable classroom routine (everyone’s doing something different!). However, the promise of a classroom filled with kids actively engaged in reading and writing was too good to pass up.

To say that I was building a plane in midair is putting it mildly. I had some great resources – Room 213 has some great products and I purchased her reader’s notebook to get started. Our building has a well stocked media center, so the kids were easily able to find books that interested them (or were short enough to inflict minimal pain.) However, there was one stumbling block:

The conference.

Student conferences are something in twenty years I have never been able to master. I’m sure my problems are the same as everyone else:

How do I get through 28 kids in 50 minutes?
What can I have my students doing that will keep them occupied and won’t supply constant interruptions?
What will I talk about? And what if we can’t come up with anything to talk about?

I had no good answer to these questions, so I put off the conferences for a couple of weeks hoping that something ingenious would come to mind. Every day I thought about doing them, I found some compelling reason for why I could put them off- the kids needed my help with whatever they were working on, they hadn’t read enough yet, I hadn’t had enough tea to get me through it. I never tried to structure the period so I could conference because I wasn’t sure I could do it successfully, and I shared every teacher’s fear of spending a period looking like you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

However, I found myself with three extra days before the rest of the freshmen teachers were ready to start our research project, so I had a good stretch of time that I could fill with reader’s workshop activities. And I knew that I had the perfect time to do conferencing if I just set my mind to it.

Sometimes things align for what you want to do. My students had been working on a suspenseful narrative earlier in the week and I was able to get the laptop carts at the last minute. This gave students two options for the period: work on their stories, or work on their reader’s notebook, both of which I knew they could do with minimal help.

I also had the idea that conferences would go better if I did them in groups. We already had groups set from an activity from the previous week, so I kept those groups and called them up to a table I set in the middle of the room for our chats. Completely on accident, I created an ideal environment for what I wanted to do.

And guess what? It went really well.

It turns out kids really like to talk about books if they like what they are reading. I asked every student about the conflict in the book and gave them something I wanted them to look for in the pages they read between Friday and Tuesday. Initially I wanted to give every student the same thing to look for, but as I became more comfortable talking to them, I began to ask them to engage with the book differently depending on what they were reading. Most of all, I communicated I was interested in their book and what they had to say. I was also about to almost get through everyone in the period. I only had a few students left that I had to conference with on Friday. Not ideal, but something I can work on.

For those who are thinking of using reader’s workshop and conferences in the classroom, here are some tips:

Start small.

When I asked kids to fill out the reader’s notebook, I gave them too much to do. It would be better to focus on three things than six. This will help them get the drift of what they are doing, and less for you to manage. It’s easier to get more complex as you go on.

Make sure the students have the right activity to do while you’re conferencing.

During the second set of conferences, I asked the kids to read or finish up their reader’s notebook activities while I was conferencing. However, most of them were done with their notebook, and reading wasn’t enough to keep them occupied and quiet without being off task. Conferencing is counterproductive if kids aren’t doing meaningful work when they aren’t in a conference, so you have to pick a task that will keep them busy and minimize the risk of off-task behavior.

Don’t schedule conferences too close together.

Most of my students had not read enough from Friday to Tuesday to answer the question I had posed. It seems like a week or a little less is optimal.

Conferencing for a period is fairly exhausting.

You have to think on your feet a lot, which can be draining if you are doing it period after period. Be prepared. Don’t have all your classes doing conferences on the same day.

As much as I liked it, I still have some lingering questions about reader’s workshop. I still don’t know how to build rigor into it. I don’t know whether the books they choose are making them better readers, or whether I can ask thoughtful, engaging questions that force them to think about the book at a higher level. I’m also not sure that some of the books that they pick allow a deep engagement with theme. Perhaps this will be the subject of another post.

Learning should be fun! Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store for fun comic resources like those below.

Suspenseful Stories in Langauge Arts: Writing the Story

October 21, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

Writing suspenseful stories in the Language Arts classroom can be a fun way to teach students how stories work. In previous posts I shared model texts that I use to teach kids how suspense works. In another post I discussed how you can teach literary devices while creating the suspenseful story. In this post we’ll put it all together and write a story!

First, though, I’d like to share another resource that you can use to discuss suspense. It’s a short CGI film called “Alma” about a little girl that visits a toy store that isn’t what it seems. It’s appropriate for any age, yet suitable creepy. The less said about it before you show it the better – you want kids to be thinking about the moments where suspense happens.

Now on the the story!

The suspenseful story assignment

Here are the guidelines that I give students for the assignment. Feel free to add any other literary devices that you’d like. FlashFictionAssignment

You’ll notice that I set a word limit on them by asking them to write a piece of flash fiction that should be 500 words or less. I give them this boundary because it gives them a length to manage and forces them to think creatively about how to fill the space. In general, if I don’t give them a length requirement, they will lose control of the narrative.

There are plenty of examples of flash fiction out there, and I spent a lot of time finding stories that were a suitable length. Many of them were entertaining, but too short. Some of them were not appropriate. Some were just poorly written.

Three-Minute Fiction

However, I found the best source for great flash fiction on NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest page. They haven’t had the contest since 2103, but all of the best stories can be found here, and it’s a treasure trove of stories that you can use. The trick is finding suspenseful stories, though, and I had the best luck with the contest in which a character finds something that they have no intention of returning. They are a little shorter than the required length, but nevertheless terrific examples for what you can accomplish in a few words. Be careful! These are addictive reading.

Here are the stories that I used. Be sure to preview them: some aren’t appropriate for all ages. But there are plenty more on the site to choose from.

Picked Clean

Litter

Snowflake

The Art of Compromise

Ghost Words

Here’s the link to all of the finalists for this contest. There are some other good ones there too.

One Last Thing

One last tip: here’s a great infographic on the physical effects of fear. I use this so that students can describe what is happening to their main character as they encounter their suspenseful situation.

Happy writing!

Don’t keep your students in suspense while waiting for fun lessons! Check out my store for great cartoon products like the one on the left to keep your kids engaged.