Assessing our little writers. What's working? What's not?

When analyzing the students’ writing it was clear that students have very different strengths and weaknesses! I was working with a group of 5 students who are all the lowest readers in the class. Although it is important to note that their reading ability does now always align with writing ability, the two skills certainly go hand in hand in many ways. One strength of the writers is that they were very resourceful. I was working on the skill of summarizing with these egger to learn students. When I gave these second graders time to write they immediately reached for the book we were summarizing to utilize pictures and the context. This strength tells me that the students are used to being able to use their book to respond to a text….is this a habit that we support? Is it okay to allow the students to use a text when responding to it? After thinking about it, I believe that it is okay while they are learning the strategy of summarizing. My goal for these students is to get what they are thinking down on paper! I want to see as much paper pencil time as possible! But once the students understand more fully the  strategy I think it may be helpful to have them recall facts rather than looking the back up in the book. This will hopefully transition students to being more in tuned to the text from the beginning! We will work toward this by the end of the year!
Another strength of the writers is establishing the main ideas of the story. The book we were reading was about two girls who raced kites in a kite contest. The girls’ kites crashed and they decided to rebuild the kite together. After collaborating their ideas they were able to build a kite that won the competition. One student said, “Sarah and Lena both made kites!” and then another student responded by saying, “They were sad when their kites crashed.” This happened several times in our conversation about the book, where the students added on and built off other students’ responses. I think this conversation helped some of the students in knowing what to write. Most of students are able to discuss what happened in the story and then portray this in paper. When the class takes the time to discuss and model what they are looking for, they are more likely to have to spend less time on it later! This tells me that the content of the summary that they established was proficient. Having the main idea in a second grade summary is the primary thing we look for! I was pleased to see that each of the students had the main idea documented in their summary! YES!
Lastly the organization that the students had was very sequential and logical. I was so happy to see a clear beginning, middle and end! It was so great to see! The idea that they are able to see that one event leads to another is a great discovery as a teacher. We have also spent a lot of time working on cause and effect which is showing through in their ability to order events. By having this clear organization, it is obvious that they understand the idea that one event leads to another and there is a logical order of events in a summary.
It was interesting to see how the writing between students was different. Where one student wrote, “They made kites.” Another student wrote, “Sarah and Lena made kites over summer when they were board.” When I went back and conferenced with the student who wrote “They made kites,” I asked her, “How she could make this more visual? How can you paint a better picture of what was going on in the story? If I did not read this story how can you give me a better image of what happened?” After a conversation we did decide to rewrite the sentence to be, “Sarah and Lena were board when they were not in school anymore and made kites that they flew at the beach.” This was a great step in the right direction. I was so pleased that we developed this sentence! I then allowed this student to go through and read her summary again and find 2 more areas where she could make her writing MORE! I was determined to spend a little extra time with this student because they are the one that is struggling the most with this. I made an adapted individual learning plan for this student. Just as Anderson outlines in his book Assessing Writers he focuses on 4 essential parts 1. encompassing all aspects of a child as a writer 2. Using Information from Multiple Sources 3. Focusing on a few goals at a time and 4. Include appropriate goals. So for this student I focused on adding more detail to her summary. It was very surface and did not meet the criteria I was looking for. To do this I used information from the rubric, my cooperating teacher, as well as Anderson’s book. The main goals were to add more detail to the summary by being more descriptive and adding a visual image for the reader. We discussed many examples of descriptive writing versus not o descriptive writing. It was good to see this comparison.

 Overall when assessing the students’ writing it was great to focus on their strengths and to help them make strides as young writer! One thing that became really obvious to me and stood out from Anderson’s book was his quote “we are teaching the writer not the writing.” I think this is important to keep in mind when analyzing writing because we really are trying to find ways to help the writer achieve their goals in their writing! Must focus on the writer!