Overview of the Year for Fourth-Grade

Transcription

1 1 Overview of the Year for Fourth-Grade September/October October/ November November/ December January/February February/March April May/June Unit One The Arc of Story: Writing Realistic Fiction Unit Two Boxes and Bullets: Personal and Persuasive Essays Unit Three The Literary Essay: Writing About Fiction Unit Four Bringing History to Life Unit Five Test Preparation Unit Six The Craft of Fiction: Using Figurative Language, Symbolism and Point of View to Highlight Themes Unit Seven Journalism This curricular plan details the Reading and Writing Project s proposal for a Common Corealigned writing curriculum. This document has grown out of three decades of research and teaching in writing. The document and the methods in it have been revised continually during that time in order to reflect the most current knowledge on teaching in general and teaching writing, in particular, and in order to be sure the teaching is aligned to the demands of high stakes assessments and of current standards. The TCRWP has always contributed to knowledge of best practices, so generally this work has already been benchmarked to or beyond standards. This current set of curricular plans is not only aligned to the Common Core State Standards, it also reflects a close attention to Webb s Depths of Knowledge (DOK) and Charlotte Danielson s most recent work. This one document overviews a year-long curriculum for fourth grade writers. This curriculum is further detailed in the series, Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and

2 2 Narrative Writing: A Common Core Workshop Curriculum, which include four units of study books for fourth grade, each containing the minilessons, small-group work, conferring, and teacher- and child-facing learning progressions that undergird this year-long curriculum for teaching writing to fourth graders. Both this set of curricular plans and the series of books for fourth graders are part of a larger curriculum that provides a yearlong K 8 spiral curriculum in writing. Fashioned with input from hundreds of teachers, coaches, and principals, this curriculum is supported by decades of work in thousands of schools. It especially stands on the shoulders of an earlier series, Calkins Units of Study for Teaching Writing, Grades 3 5 (Heinemann, 2006). Each of the suggested units of study for fourth graders tends to last five to six weeks and involves students progressing through the stages of writing to produce more than one piece of writing. The fact that students are supported through several cycles of the writing process allows for in fact, requires students to transfer all they learn from one cycle of work in a particular kind of writing to another cycle of work in that same kind of writing. Furthermore, by writing not just one personal narrative, one informational book or one essay within a unit, but several, students are given opportunities to work with more independence, doing work that represents a higher DOK. The fourth grade curriculum calendar offers instruction in narrative, argument, informational, and poetic writing. The instruction builds on that which has been given across grades K-3, but also recognizes that some students will not have received that prior instruction and will need especially intensive opportunities to accelerate their abilities. This instruction enables students to work in each of these fundamental modes with increasing sophistication and with decreasing reliance on scaffolds. For example, first graders write Small Moment stories by recalling an event and retelling it across their fingers, whereas fourth graders plot narratives against the graphic organizer of a story booklet, revising the narratives so that beginnings and endings relate to what the story is really about. In a similar manner, from kindergarten through eighth grade, students become progressively more capable at writing opinion (or argument) texts. In first grade, for example, children make and substantiate claims in a variety of persuasive forms; by fourth grade, they learn to use specific expository structures (such as the essay) to persuade. By fifth grade, students analyze informational texts to understand conflicting points of view and write argument essays in which they take a stand, drawing on evidence from research. Because the units of study are designed to build upon one another, a teacher at any one grade level can always use the write-ups for preceding and following grades to develop some knowledge for ways to support those writers who would especially benefit from

3 3 extra support as well as those who need further enrichment. This sometimes takes a bit of research. Units in, say, writing informational texts will not always bear the same title (these might be called all-about books at one grade and research reports at another), nor will these units necessarily be at a consistent time during the year. While these curricular plans support units that vary according to grade level, it is also true that all of the units aim to teach writers the essentials of good writing, and those essentials are generally applicable across genres. Eudora Welty once said, Poetry is the school I went to in order to learn to write prose. That is, work in any particular genre can advance writing skills that are applicable across genres. Interestingly, the essential skills of great writers remain consistent whether the writer is seven years old, seventeen, or seventy. All of us try again and again to write with focus, detail, grace, structure, clarity, insight, honesty, and increasing control of conventions, and all of us do so by rehearsing, planning, studying exemplar texts, drafting, rereading, revising, re-imagining, and editing. There is nothing inevitable about this particular way of unrolling a sequence of writing units of study. There are lots of other ways teachers could plan a writing curriculum. We lay out this one course of study for fourth graders because we believe it is a wise trajectory. It stands on the shoulders of the work these children will have done in the preceding year, enabling them to meet the Common Core State Standards for fourth grade and setting them up for fifth grade. The other reason we lay out this single line of work is that the Reading and Writing Project s conference days can provide close support for this iteration of a writing curriculum. Conference days usually precede the units of study by at least a week, if not two weeks. These days are available through the website, /workshops-study-groups/tc-workshops.html. Our website, www. also provides a bibliography of books that align to these units, most of which are available through Booksource. A Quick Guide to the Units The Rationale for the Sequence A few important assumptions underlie this curricular plan. First, the units are balanced so equal attention is given to narrative, opinion and informational writing. Always, the first unit that supports a kind of writing is more accessible and the second is more demanding.

4 4 For example, in opinion writing, students progress from writing personal essays to writing persuasive essays to writing literary essays. The year begins with a focus on narrative writing. This attention to narrative is important first because the narrative writing exemplar in the Common Core is very well written (especially when viewed in contrast to the exemplars from the other genres), suggesting a level of expectations that will require students to proceed through an ambitious sequence of narrative work. Then, too, it is during this work with narrative writing that students learn to write with fluency, with a command of conventions, with detail and structure. Later, all these skills can be transferred to other genres. Assessment Undergirding all of these units of study is a systemic approach to assessment. You will probably want to assess your students abilities to write on demand narrative, informational, and argument writing. The TCRWP has developed a tool containing learning progressions and teacher-facing as well as child-facing CCSS-aligned checklists that can help you and your students track their progress along pathways of writing development. These assessments will allow you to identify where each of your students is in a sequence of writing development and they will help you and your students to plan realistic, doable next steps. This can make your conferring much more helpful and your teaching clearer. Assessment Ladders in The Units of Study in Opinion, Information, and Narrative Writing not only outlines these tools, but provides detailed instructions for how to implement them successfully in the classroom. Because you will want to be able to note growth, it is very important that your first assessments occur at the very start of your year. Your students come to you with competencies and histories as writers. By taking the time to understand what your students already know and can do, you will allow yourself to capitalize on and extend those foundations, rather than reteaching what they already know. Then, too, by capturing the data representing what writers can do at the very start of the year, you put yourself in a position to show parents and others all the ways in which your students have grown as writers over the course of the year. In your autumn parent-teacher conferences, you will want to bring the writing a learner did on the first day of school and contrast it with the writing he or she did recently. Having the before and after comparison allows you to illuminate the growth students have (and have not yet) made. In order to get this baseline data on your writers, you will want to devote a full day s writing workshop specifically fifty minutes to an on demand assessment of narrative writing, another similar chunk of time to an on demand assessment of informational

5 5 writing, and a third day to a similar assessment of opinion (or argument) writing. We cannot stress enough that you this needs to be hands-off assessment. Resist the temptation to scaffold kids work during this assessment. The job is not just to give these on demand assessments, but also to take seriously the challenge of making sure that as the units unfold, your instruction is calibrated around this data, and the students' work gets progressively better. These on demands can function as your starting gate. It will be important to think how to communicate expectations for writing in ways that students can understand so that they are able to self-assess, using a student-facing rubric. Students can note ways in which their writing still needs work, and you can help each writer set goals for future work. The act of setting a goal for oneself is important for writers, making it likely that they will not just be filling up pages in writers notebooks, but that they'll consciously work towards employing strategies they've been taught and reaching towards qualities of good writing. The Narrative, Informational, and Opinion Writing Checklists and Learning Progressions are closely aligned to the Common Core State Standards, with six levels for grades K-6, and language designed to support teachers in assessing writing skill development and creating teaching points. The continua, which are available in Assessment Ladders, will be invaluable when assessing your students on-demands. We suggest you sit with your grade team to assess student work in order to ensure consistency across the grade. After giving the narrative on-demand, for example, each teacher will want to choose an on-demand narrative that he or she feels exemplifies each level (for example, one piece for level 3, one piece for level 4, one piece for level 5). As a grade you can determine your final set of anchor papers one piece for each level. The conversation that ensues during this process will help to make sure all teachers on the grade are consistent (or relatively so) in how they assess writing, by using the continuum. The Units Fourth-graders are poised to grow in important ways as writers this year. They are ready to internalize writing strategies so that what are, at first, concrete, methodical procedures become far more fleeting, flexible, and efficient ways of working. Then too, we believe that most students can begin to learn the expectations of academic writing, ramping up the work they learned to do in third grade and embracing the challenges and rigors of new expectations. You ll find, below, a brief description of the units of study for fourth grade writing. Although we re excited about these curricular plans and believe strongly in the trajectory

6 6 we have created, we also know that nothing matters more in your teaching than your own personal investment in it. It is critical that you modify this plan as you see fit so that you feel a sense of ownership over your teaching and so that your teaching reflects what you know about your students. We encourage you to work in sync with colleagues from fourth grade (and perhaps third and fifth grades) so that your teaching can benefit from the group s cumulative knowledge. Ideally, this will mean that your grade-level meetings can be occasions for swapping minilessons, planning lessons in ways that inform your teaching, assessing and glorying in children s work, and planning ways to respond to their needs. We encourage you to rely on If... Then...: Assessment-Based Planning from the new Units of Study books when weighing and measuring your options. The fourth-grade units were devised with the expectation that children enter fourth grade having already studied the meat-and-potatoes of narrative, informational, and opinion writing, with many children presumably studying these within the unit that are captured in the third-grade books. Of course, because the books are being unrolled for the first time this year, this may not be the case. If they have followed the units of study before, however, most students will enter your classroom poised to make great strides in the fourth-grade units we ve provided. We begin the year with The Arc of Story, a unit designed to raise the level of narrative writing children do. In this first unit of study, you ll strive towards increased independence and dramatic growth in the level of students writing.given that your emphasis will be to help students write a lot, you ll ask them to cycle through the writing process several times. So, for instance, after spending a few days collecting, children will choose their first seed idea, rehearse for how that story will go, draft, revise and edit. Then, you ll shepherd children back to the beginning of the writing process to begin a second piece. The important thing will be that after working on this first piece of writing, you ask students to transfer all they have learned thus far to a second piece of writing. Following several rounds of narrative writing, students will move to Boxes and Bullets: Personal and Persuasive Essays. The unit begins by supporting children in writing personal essays that are structured in a main-claim/supportive examples or reasons fashion. Students write one flash draft essay, done in conjunction with a whole-class guided practice session. Then the unit devotes a few weeks to helping students slow down and learn the moves that are required for writing essays well, doing this as they work on a single personal essay. Then students will flash draft that essay, revise and then edit. After less than three weeks of work on personal essays, the focus of the unit will shift to persuasive essays. The work with persuasive essays proceeds more quickly, with students transferring and applying all they have learned to engage in this work with greater independence. As students begin to take themselves through the process, they will be undertaking work of higher cognitive demand and moving to higher levels of DOK.

7 7 Next students will move to Literary Essay: Writing About Fiction, harnessing all they learned in Boxes and Bullets to create and defend ideas about literature. They will begin by developing and defending basic ideas about literature--with a special emphasis on the challenges presented when one writes about a text, rather than life. Then, in a second round of essay writing, you ll challenge students to lift the level of their essays by lifting the level of their theses--writing about ideas that are more complex, nuanced, and interpretive and supporting those ideas with various forms of textual evidence. Students will also learn to analyze author s craft and use this in service of supporting their ideas. Finally, in a third and final round of essay, students will move from writing about one text to crafting compare and contrast essays about two pieces of literature. Finally, in the final writing unit before Test Preparation, students will begin the unit Bringing History to Life. This book builds on the foundational information writing children did in third grade, this time harnessing all they know to write about historical topics. You ll begin this unit by channeling students to write about a broad topic--the American Revolution-- but to do so in well-structured ways and with a variety of rich and detailed information. Students will learn that informational writing takes on many forms, and will end the first bend with a book that includes how-to writing, essay writing, and all-about writing. In bend two and three, students will move to writing about more focused topics, and eventually to developing ideas about the topics on which they write. Students will be introduced to a variety of techniques for researching a topic, and organizing and presenting information. Following the test, students will return to narrative writing with the unit The Craft of Fiction: Using Figurative Language, Symbolism and Point of View to Highlight Themes. For this unit, and especially for the start of the unit, you ll want to see engagement and stamina. You will find that your students are dying to write fiction, and their zeal is something to behold they are ready to invest heart and soul in this unit and eager to write more and work harder than before. You want your writers choosing what moments from a story they will tell. They should think not only what happens in those moments but also about how they can write those moments well enough that readers can experience them. You ll want to encourage your fourth graders to carry forward everything they learned about narrative craft in earlier units, this time using it in service of fictional stories. Most importantly, this unit will help students to bring the CCSS reading standards 4, 5, and 6 to their writing. That is, they ll learn to make choices as authors (just as they study the choices other authors makes), and to use figurative language and other narrative techniques to bring forth important themes and messages. You ll cap the year with Journalism, an all-time favorite among teachers and students alike. The goal of this journalism unit is to teach students to write quickly, to revise purposefully

8 8 and swiftly, and to write from positions of thoughtful observation within their community. You will teach your class first to write quick news reports, and then to learn some of the craft of investigative journalism, in which they often conduct interviews and collect observation notes. Typical news reports include: Spider Gets Loose From Science Lab, or Excitement Over Added Recess Time. Investigative pieces may sound like: Spiders Get a Bum Rap at P.S. 450, or More Recess Time Reveals Need For More Supervision. In the news reports, students learn to write concise, focused reports that tell the who, what, where, and when with a sense of drama. In the investigative reports, students learn to ask questions, to ponder the meaning of everyday happenings, and to write to suggest significance. Grammar and Conventions in the Writing Curricular Calendar We recommend that you also take fifteen minutes at the start of the year, and periodically throughout the year, to assess students growing control of spelling. We recommend administering Donald Bear s spelling inventory detailed in Words Their Way. You ll give your whole class what amounts to a spelling test, asking them to spell each of twenty-five words. To assess your spellers, you will need to count not the words correct but the features correct this can take a few minutes for each child. The result is that you can channel your whole-class spelling and vocabulary instruction so that your teaching is aligned to the main needs you see across your class. It will also help you differentiate that instruction for those spellers who need the most extra support as well as your strongest spellers. You will also want to assess your writers command over the mechanics of writing and look at their work through the lens of the Common Core State Standards for fourth grade. You will want to understand which conventions of written language your children use with automaticity whenever they write. To understand this, look at their on demand pieces of writing. For fourth graders, ask yourself: Which children do and do not tend to write in paragraphs? Which children do and do not include direct dialogue and use quotation marks and other punctuation associated with dialogue? Which children do and do not generally control their verb tenses? Which children do and do not generally control subject-verb agreement so that the subjects and verbs are either plural or singular? Which children are beginning to compose complex sentences?

9 9 If you have children who do not use end punctuation correctly, who do not write in paragraphs, who seem to sprinkle uppercase letters randomly throughout their writing, or who don t yet use quotation marks to set off direct dialogue, embed instruction in all these things into your first two units of study. Establishing a long-term inquiry across the months on punctuation, capitalization, and verb usage is another way to support student growth in grammar. You ll first teach any of these skills by embedding them into editing work, and then you ll expect the instruction to affect drafting. For example, if some students are not writing with end punctuation, teach them to read over their writing and to put a period where a thought or action ends. This exercise will eliminate a lot of run-on sentences quickly and with a minimum of fuss. Then you can teach them to write by having a complete thought, saying it to themselves, and then writing without pausing until they reach the end of that thought, whereupon they leave a period on the page. Most students speak in sentences; they can write in them. You will also want to be sure that your young writers are not boxed into simple sentence structures when they write. You may have students whose sentences all seem to go like this: A subject did something (perhaps to someone, with something). I went to the park. I rode my bike. I got an ice cream. I came home. These children may feel in their bones that the writing lacks something, and they may try to solve the problem by linking simple sentences with conjunctions: I went to the park where I rode my bike. Then I got an ice cream and I came home. But that doesn t solve the problem. Teach these children that it helps to tell when, how, under what conditions, with what thoughts in mind, the person did the something. The sentences can now look like this: One sunny Saturday morning, I went to the park. Not long after that, I got an ice cream. Noticing the time, I hurried home. It can also help to tell how one did something and to tell about that activity. I went to the park, the one down the road from me. I rode my bike quickly, round and round in circles. I got an ice cream, a double-scoop chocolate that melted all over me... For those of you wanting to understand syntactical complexity more, you may find it interesting to measure your children s syntactic maturity in writing by looking at the average length (the number of words) of the grammatical sentences your students construct. Hunt calls these the T-units (Hunt, 1965). For instance, if a student writes: I went to the store. I bought some candy. I met Lisa. These are three independent T-units (or simple sentences) and each one is short, with just a few words. This is simple syntax. This would still be written in T-units of four or five words if the sentences were linked with the word and because a T-unit is the term for a possible sentence, whether or not the writer punctuates it as such. On the other hand, the number of T-units would double if the sentence went like this: When I went to the store, I bought some candy before I met Lisa. Nowhere in that sentence is a place where a period could have been added, so this is all one T-unit composed of fourteen words. More complex syntax has more words within a T-unit.

10 10 For example, the same sentence could contain yet more words per T-unit (and still be more complex): Yesterday I went to the store, where I bought some candy and met Lisa, my cousin and best friend. Some writers who struggle with punctuation show complicated syntax, which is terrific. It is important for teachers to realize that correctness is not the only goal. A writer s growing ability to write complex sentences (with many words per T- unit although don t talk T-units with kids) should be celebrated. Writers with complex syntax will make some errors, but these writers are still far more advanced than those who use correct punctuation but rely only on simple sentences. One crucial point is that students will move through stages of using and confusing new constructs before they master them. This means that getting things slightly wrong can be a sign of growth. If we only fix students writing or tell them to be correct, then they may revert to simpler vocabulary and sentence structure that they are sure they know how to punctuate. For instance, when students first start moving into past tense, they may not know all the forms of irregular verbs and may confuse some. If we emphasize only accuracy, they will revert to present tense or to safe verbs they know. In the same way, they may not dare write longer sentences if they re not sure how to punctuate them. Common stages of development include unfamiliarity, familiarity and experimentation, using and confusing, mastery, and control (Bear, 2008).