Writing Lesson Plan 1!

After teaching my first lesson about adding details into our ‘Beginning, Middle, and End’ narrative writing pieces, I learned a lot about the way in which my students think about independent writing. The lesson consisted of ordering 3 pictures into their correct sequence and labeling each with the words ‘first, next, and last’ to illustrate organization. Students learned the importance of organizing their sentences in their story to go in the same order as their pre-planning pictures in their BME narratives. A majority of the class understood the lesson and then proceeded to write in the journals independently on their own story using these three order words. However, there were three students (lower level learners) that struggled with the idea of incorporating these words into a story to successfully display order or sequence. They needed to be individually helped in order to explain the connection between the BME planning pictures and the sentences in their stories.

By filling out an assessment chart (how many order words each child used and if in the right sequence) and circulating the room and individually reading the students’ journals, I could make some interpretations about their understanding of the lesson and topic of order words and organizing a writing piece. Some of my students work really well independently and can receive pointers from adults rather well. They will go back in their story easily and alter something that they have talked about with an adult and feel like needs to be changed. Other students, ones that seemed to struggle more with the idea or ordering events in their story, did not do this so well. I also noticed that a lot of students like to just write details and sentences about their story in any order and not have them relate to their pre-planning pictures at all. These students’ stories tend to be confusing, seeing as there is not really any organization to the narrative.

Interestingly enough, by having students work on personal narratives related to specific topics, I learned that my class has a very active imagination and can add enormous amounts of details to their stories…when they want to. It’s all about finding some topic or some activity that inspires them and motivates them to constantly write.

I have actually been constantly providing the students that needed more help with the lesson support since I have been teaching. I am now aware that these individuals write slower than the rest of the group and that they need a little more individualized attention to get them focused and on task. When we are writing independently from now on and after I have taught a mini-lesson in front of the class, I make it a point to go to these few students and prompt them with questions that will guide them to write. However, if I was to teach this lesson again, I would use a student’s already written journal story to illustrate how we can order a BME writing piece. I have found that children seem a lot more engaged when they know they could be picked to share a story and they get to watch their peers share their stories. Students seem t o learn better when you make it more personal to their writing; allowing students to share narratives and reflect and add order words in a peer’s piece could reach a lot of children on their own levels of writing. I also feel that students would have seen how to incorporate more organization order words into their writing and in the correct sequence.