backtracking...

At different points in the blog I have mentioned what writing pieces the students were working on. This is a simple overview of the pieces I analyzed using the 6+1 rubric.

1. Initial on-demand "expert" book- This book was written independently at the beginning of the informational writing unit. It was written in one 45-minute setting.

2. Animal research book- This was the large writing project that was completed as a partnership. This book took approximately 4 weeks (give or take due to the never ending winter). The students worked in writing workshop for about 30 minutes daily.

3. Post on-demand "expert" book- This book was written independently as the final project of the informational writing unit. It was written in one 45-minute setting.

Here are some pictures of my "coding". The green sticky notes are sentence fluency and the purple are conventions. The pictures do not have the coding for presentation in them.

I am also including some of my narrative about what I found for sentence fluency and conventions in a few of my cases' work.

Skunks

Conventions:

Throughout the course of the study Matthew improved in the area of conventions. On the initial independent on-demand writing prompt Matthew had several sentences that were missing punctuation. He also had very large spacing in-between words that was not consistent, and was using a mix of lowercase and capital letters within words. There are some letters that Matthew does not form correctly.

As Matthew worked with his partner on his animal research book his conventions improved considerably. He improved with spacing, however there are still some large spaces, and he no longer used a mix of capital and lowercase letters. In his animal book he consistently ended all sentences with correct punctuation. Matthew continues to form some letters incorrectly.

Matthew completed a second independent on-demand writing prompt at the end of this study. On

this writing prompt Matthew used punctuation at the end of each of his sentences. He formed his “b” and “d” letters as capitals throughout this piece. I assume the reason for this was because he did not want to confuse them when writing them lowercase. On this writing piece Matthew’s spacing is large but is consistent between each word.

            On all three of Matthew’s writing pieces there were several words that could not easily be decoded. Matthew confuses some of his letter sounds and this prevents him from being able to phonetically spell lots of words. After Matthew wrote his on-demand text I had him reread it to me and I wrote down exactly what he said.  

Sentence Fluency:

            On the initial on-demand writing prompt Matthew wrote in a pattern format. He repeated the phrase “I can mac a …” (I can make a….). The only sentence in his book that broke from this pattern was the final sentence. Throughout his writing he also used only simple sentences and used no connective words.

            As Matthew wrote his animal research book with his partner he continued to write only in simple sentences and did not include connective words to combine sentences and phrases. He began using different sentence starters and his book did not follow a pattern format. He did have several sentences in his book that started with “Skunks…” which resulted in his writing being choppy and repetitive at several different places in his book.

            In Matthew’s post on-demand writing he carried over the variations of sentence starters. His writing continued to be simple sentences and there were no transitions or connective words in his writing. The lack of connective words caused the writing to still sound choppy and mechanical. 

Elephants

Conventions:

            Allison remained inconsistent with the use of correct conventions throughout the course of this study. In the beginning Allison completed the independent on-demand writing prompt. On this writing assignment she wrote one sentence only on most of the pages but was consistent in using end punctuation. Every sentence began with the word I and she capitalized it each time. Allison also used some additional capital letters in the middle of words. Throughout this book most of her words had less than a finger space between words.

            Allison completed the animal research book with a partner. Throughout her animal research book she was able to consistently use punctuation correctly in her writing, only missing it on one page. In her animal research book she continued to be inconsistent. Some words have one finger space between them but other words have very little to no spacing between them. Allison did correctly use capital and lowercase letters throughout this book.

            On the final on-demand prompt Allison worked independently to complete it. In this writing piece she varied the numbers of sentences she used per page but she used no punctuation to indicate the beginning or ending of sentences. In this writing piece Allison used a more consistent spacing between letters but it was a small amount of space, about the size of a small paperclip.